Distance education as a course in its own right goes far beyond the understanding of the teacher and students being in different locations and times. It is not just about uploading course content files to an online platform for students to download. Distance education is not definitely not of the idea that the the online course will take care of itself somehow. It is also not about the teacher being absent and showing up on the last week with grades. It is so much more!

Distance education is about being 100% involved with your students and working hard to best recreate in the online environment what students expect from a face-to-face classroom. When you talk about distance education, either from the teacher or student’s side, you should do your best to see not only the course content and student’s, but also all of the intricate relations and connections that are needed between all of the elements involved to give a successful online course which provides a meaningful learning experience to students.

In short, an online teacher is not only expected to provide conditions for learning to happen but also the necessary meaning students need to have in order to be successfull during the online course. It is a complex task that requires at least double the work of a traditional face-to-face class session.

The course items you need to work on are:

• Course information files: this involves institutional references, course hours and schedule, units and topics, methodology, expected outcomes, bibliography, evaluation characteristics general overview and any other item that has to do with course description.
• Technical Knowledge: this involves the teacher working with the Learning Management System (LMS) before the course starts to get to know its minutia and anticipate where students might have technical problems. Things like logging on, up/downloading files, sending messages, posting content, sending messages, calendar features, evaluation tables, inserting web media and any other item which involves using the platform to get to the course content.
• Promoting Learner Autonomy: this involves setting up a second agenda of how to promote learner autonomy within every unit. This could be in the form of questionnaires, cognition and motivation tests, journal keeping, or simply giving feedback on content.
• Standardizing Online Learning Materials: this involves breaking down the units into focused and manageable tasks in addition to adapting any available course content for online engagement as well as enriching it with new resources from the web and also very likely creating new content specifically for the online version of the course. Typically, over time, the amount of resource files usually grows dramatically.
• Setting up a Task schedule: this involves using an online calendar, either one in the LMS or something like Google Calendar, and creating the events for the task delivery dates. If possible, set reminders for students. The entire course should be schedule in the calendar before the start date.
• Helping students: this involves setting up a plan to help students who may struggle in keeping up with the pace you have set. A good LMS will give the teacher information on when the last student log on was. With this information, how long do you consider prudent to reach out to the student to see if there is anything wrong? 3 days? 5 days? a week? These sort of messages generally are sent through mail.
• Evaluation and its considerations: this involves setting up your evaluation areas and corresponding rubrics for each of them. Also, you should anticipate which considerations you will be taking with regards to student’s participations and the tasks you have programmed.
• How to motivate students: this involves defining how you will motivate your students at all times with the purpose of sparking their curiosity, helping them engage with the course and avoiding any feelings of isolation.
• Tech and Content tutorials: this involves creating some kind of tutorials to show students either how the technology works or how to engage with some sections of the course. That people use computers does not mean people know how to use computers for learning. Try to anticipate where students will have difficulties and create tutorials for that. These could be simple text and image files, audios or even video tutorials.

These are some of the most important things a distance teacher has to work on when preparing a distance course. I have not listed them in any specific order nor do I state it is all there is to be done. Each course has its own set of particularities which are dependent on the institution, the student, the teacher, the online platform and also the course content itself. Generally, these particularities may generate additional minor tasks the teacher must complete in order to have everything ready by the course start date.

I would like to end this series of study notes with an analogy. Many years ago, when I was studying English grammar while also teaching English, I came to the realization that students do not necessarily want to know all of the grammar. They just want to communicate in a meaningful way. The teacher, on the other hand, has to know as much grammar as possible so that when he or she is teaching it, he or she teaches as little grammar as possible. What I’m saying is, know as much as you can about everything, but use that knowledge to inform your actions and your wisdom with regards on what to say and not say.