When I look back on my days in school and college, I often associate the subjects I loved most with the teachers who taught them. You could say my flair for mathematics is a result of my grade school teacher who taught the subject with a passion. Similar experiences in college; if I enjoyed a lecture, I would move right to the front of the class in order to get the most out of it. There were quite a few classes I slept through though. Probably the professor’s monotonous drone sounded like a lullaby to me!

The point I’m trying to make here is that a teacher has an important part to play in shaping the educational progress of a student. This responsibility is more pronounced in the case of an online instructor. Besides providing adequate motivation to stick to the course till completion, an online teacher should be able to engage his/her students in a meaningful, productive discussion. It’s the same as a classroom discussion where the professor plays the role of an arbitrator who tries to draw out the most creative and interesting points of view from his/her students.

The difficulties associated with designing, facilitating, and managing a rich, effective online discussion are numerous. The instructor has structure the questions in ways that promotes thinking instead of those that generate memorized answers. Real life cases and scenarios can be presented to the students, who can then be encouraged to put forth their ideas, thoughts, and suggestions, on what has to be or what can be done. Rather than asking questions with definite answers, a good online instructor should design proactive queries that have no easy answer, or have multiple and varied answers. This is one of the best ways to get even the most reserved students to open up, as they are just stating an opinion and so cannot go wrong.