How to offer an engaging live, online class for K-12 students

With the massive school closures due to the coronavirus pandemic, we have ushered in a new era of online teaching/learning in earnest. It is no longer a choice, but the only way for students to learn and for teachers to teach today and probably for quite a while. While I’ve been compiling various articles and video clips for my kids to read and learn about the coronavirus and its impact, I decided to take this opportunity to learn what it takes to offer a live, online class to K-12 students. I’ve been teaching “Coronavirus and why we are all home” (for ages 9-18) to a small group of children. It was a fun and successful experience. One kid in my class said “I don’t like it, but LOVE it!” 

To enable more people to also offer live, online classes to meet the needs of parents, I am writing this blog to share my findings and tips. I am also offering a webinar (an actual live, online class on its own) to illustrate, demonstrate and expand on my tips and findings. For the rest of this blog, I will cover: the great demand from parents, how to differentiate your online class from free online content, the virtual classroom, the best practices like how to make eye contacts, and how to market your classes. I conclude with a famous Chinese fable “when the old man lost his horse” to hopefully help you see the blessings in disguise.

1. Parents are eager for online classes, especially now!

On March 13, when all our schools were closing to implement social distancing, we from 6crickets sent out a parent survey. In just a few days, 320 parents responded to our survey expressing an urgent need for online classes. Here are our findings:

  • – 100% of parents said that their schools are closed.
  • – 55% have no remote learning from their schools, 21% don’t know whether there is any.
  • – 88% of those who had after-school enrichment at their schools prefer enrichment not be cancelled and instead be made available online.
  • – 94% are looking for online learning and enrichment options.
  • – 95% want to see live, online classes from the 6crickets public marketplace. 

Quite a few parents commented in addition: “We need solutions and online classes now urgently.”

In the past, we parents were often on the fence about online learning. Now online learning and teaching is the only way and will be the only way forward for a while. We, as parents, educators, or anyone who enjoys teaching, should be equipped to share the knowledge of life, not only at a time of a pandemic, but also beyond forever. 

2. What topics are parents interested in? 

If you don’t see your interested topic here, don’t be discouraged, it could be because we didn’t include it in our survey. I believe in creative teaching in many more topics that would appeal to parents. (Note that we estimate the true count for math is 72%. Math is undercounted because Math was omitted initially and added after 83 surveys were already completed) 

3. How to differentiate your paid live, online classes from free online content

One time, I signed my kids up for a live, online drawing class. Then my 10 year old son, Quincy, asked me “Mom, why did you pay for such a class? I could have just watched a free YouTube video to learn this.” Indeed, a quick search on YouTube turned up a very similar class. 

With so much free online educational content from YouTube, Khan Academy, code.org, TedEd, it is hard to have content so unique. Even if you have great unique content, that alone is insufficient. So, to better differentiate your live online classes, you need to focus on all the elements of creative teaching that robots and AI cannot do: 

  • – Foster discussions and engagements to create a highly interactive class
  • – Give individual student attention and provide individualized learning
  • – Adapt and expand what you teach based on what students know and what students express, and where discussions lead the class.
  • – Build a fun, social learning environment through small group discussions

4. The virtual classroom

Because I am already a fan of Zoom at work and heard from my professor friends that it can easily teach 60+ students in an online lecture smoothly, I went with Zoom and am delighted by many of its thoughtful features. Zoom can run on desktop, tablets, and phones. It now ranks #1 in business on the Apple App Store. 

Which Zoom product to pick

Zoom Basic is free for 40 minutes for a group meeting (your class), and unlimited for 1:1s. If all your classes are under 40 minutes, this option will work. If you are a K-12 teacher, Zoom is temporarily lifting the 40 minute limit. You can apply here

I use Zoom Pro which is economical for $14.99 a month per host. You can have up to 100 students. Although you cannot have concurrent meetings, your meeting can be up to 24 hours long and you can have  up to 50 “breakout rooms as concurrent class sessions for up to 200 students. You can pre-assign participants and have up to 50 fellow instructors as co-hosts to make breakout room assignments. So, Zoom Pro should work well for many individual, small and medium sized enrichment education businesses. 

Here are the system requirements for using Zoom which are modest. 

Essential features that are useful in my live, online class: 

Other useful technologies for online class teaching:

  • Google slides for lectures, can embed YouTube video clips
  • Google doc for collaborative editing
  • Google form  for quizzes, make sure to use the quiz mode
  • Slack for your team communication
  • 6crickets for online registration and payment along with built-in social sharing/marketing

5. Best practices

Maintain your professionalism: 

You may be teaching your online class at home. It is important to maintain your professionalism to give students’ parents confidence in your class. Here are some tips: 

  • – Look professional. Zoom virtual background is handy for removing your background mess.
  • – Put your phone and computer on “Do not disturb” mode. 
  • – Minimize the number of browser tabs and close other unnecessary applications so that your video call session can run more smoothly with enough processor speed and memory. 
  • – Practice using all the video call controls before the class starts
    •   a) Is your audio and microphone on? 
    •   b) Can you share your screen?
    •   c) Can you locate the video call controls (especially when screen sharing), such as chat , launching breakout rooms, seeing your students?
    •   d) Are your mouse or keyboard well charged and ready for your class?

How to make eye contact:

It is important to make eye contact to better engage with students. When you are meeting with someone, if that person doesn’t look at you, you’d lose interest in talking with that person, right?

Here is what I learned on how to best make eye contact in a video call. Position your computer, camera, your seat and yourself in a way that you can always look at yourself (along with your students) in video without turning your head. 

How you see yourself in the video is how your students will see you!

Class etiquette: 

Remember, you’ll want your live, online class to be as similar to an in-person class as possible. Here are my tips for class etiquette:

  • – Don’t forget to introduce yourself.
  • – Let students introduce themselves too with an easy icebreaker. It is important to build a social learning environment.
  • – Encourage students to ask relevant questions and provide relevant comments.
  • – Instruct students to  raise their hands for permission to speak or wave hands in Zoom.
  • – Ask students to put their questions or comments in Zoom chat.
  • – Use Zoom non-verbal feedback.
  • – You can mute or stop video for any students. Zoom push-to-talk could be handy: by default, all students are muted, then they can push the space bar to talk like a walkie talkie — may be fun for the students (make sure to ask students to leave Zoom chat to push the space-bar).
  • – Encourage peer-to-peer student interactions through small group discussions. Zoom breakout rooms are a very nice feature for that. You can also “walk” into any breakout room and broadcast a message to all rooms. When you close all breakout rooms, each small group gets 1 minute to wrap up their discussions. 

6. Marketing your online classes

95% of the parents who responded to our survey want to see live, online classes from 6crickets public marketplace, which we have now launched (just one week after the first school closures, thanks to our talented and hard-working dev team). I hope you get to list your creative, engaging online classes there!

Why marketing at 6crickets

  • – 6crickets has an extensive audience of parents and schools/districts throughout 25 states of the US because in addition to operating marketplaces for children’s activities, 6crickets helps schools and districts organize on-campus after-school enrichment programs. 
  • – 6crickets has built-in social marketing. 
    •   a) Parents can share schedules with one another and have their kids take classes together — friends taking classes together just makes the learning so much more fun. 
    •   b) Our social awareness feature lets parents know whether their friends’ kids have registered or are considering a class. (Of course, we are big on privacy as I am a security and privacy researcher myself, you can only see this if your friends have shared their schedule with you.) 
  • – Our weekly email newsletter is powered by AI and markets your classes to the parents who are relevant to your classes. 
  • – We advertise at both Google and Facebook
  • – Public media loves 6crickets. We have appeared on HuffPost, NBC, ABC, Seattle Times.
  • – Most importantly, it is risk free for you! It is free to list any number of seats for your sessions, only when parents enroll and you earn, 6crickets takes a small commission of 9-15%. The earlier you list, the lower the commission. 

You can easily list your online classes at 6crickets provider dashboard. We take pride in our customer support; check out these heartfelt testimonials from providers, parents, and schools

Tips for a good listing: 

Seeing is believing. In-action photographs and videos from your real classes, videos are worth 1000 words. This is how AirBnb took off initially.  Please give a succinct, attractive program name and description for both parents and children. I always ask my kids’ approval before booking any classes for them. 

When listing at 6crickets, please don’t repeat your business name in “program name”, don’t repeat grades/ages in “program name”, don’t repeat “online” in “program name” because we show all of these in our program card already. Instead, please show the fun, learning, your unique content, your special qualifications and highlights of your customer reviews to convince parents that your class will be a worthwhile experience for their children. 

7. The blessing in disguise

I am a Chinese person. So, I want to share one of my favorite Chinese fables: When the old man lost his horse. Life has many ups and downs. When it is up, the down may come because of it. When it is down, the up may come because of it. There is no fortune or misfortune. There is only life. 

Coronavirus has wreaked havoc around the world. But our climate has improved; our hygiene has improved; our health care systems throughout the world are learning and improving. Learning and teaching is also making the fundamental shift. Online learning and teaching is here to stay and will no longer be an option, but a necessity. 

8. Join Enrichment Provider Community Facebook group

Thanks to your suggestions, we have now created an Enrichment Provider Community Facebook group for us to share challenges and experiences. See you there!

Author