Online Course Technologies

In order to successfully manage a semester full of online courses, you will have to be familiar with some of the online course technologies that make online education possible. Most of the technologies in use today are old concepts that have simply been improved upon and built up over the last several decades as new technologies allowed for better refinement of how the systems worked. If you have any familiarity with the Internet, you will find that you have probably already used many of these technologies - all you have to do now is get used to using them in an educational format.

• Discussion Boards: The backbone of just about every online class out there, the discussion board is an efficient way for students and professors to interact with each other by posting messages, uploading files and exchanging work for peer review. There are many different types and styles of discussion board available on the Internet - which one your school uses is dependent on the features that they require. In any case, most boards make use of basic HTML, so if you have any familiarity with the language (or are learning it), you will have a slight advantage in being able to format your posts.
• Online Chat Rooms: Online chat rooms are like discussion boards but rather than posting a message for others to see when they next login, a chat room provides for instant poly-directional communication. Anything you type into a chat room will become instantly visible to anyone else in the chat room and they will be able to respond instantly in kind. Most like an Internet phone call where you "talk" with your fingers by typing, a chat room is a great way for an instructor to have an online meeting with his or her students, but this rarely happens due to the difficulty of getting the conflicting schedules of online students to mesh at a specific time.
• Podcasting: Podcasting is a one-way communication sometimes used by college instructors to pass on audio messages, reviews, or critiques to their students. A podcast is an audio recording of a voice or music that can then be posted online for retrieval or e-mailed to a particular recipient.
• Video Streaming: Video streaming is an old technology that is only recently growing in popularity in online education use thanks to the wider prevalence of high speed Internet connections among the students. A class that uses this technology is most often going to be streaming a video of the professor as he or she actually lectures to the class on a particular subject or topic. Like a podcast, a video recording can be made permanent to be retrieved later or e-mailed to the students in the class.