Key Learnings on Online Teaching from 6crickets Happy Hour Tuesday

We had a fabulous time and learned a lot about how to best conduct an online camp or class at 6crickets Happy Hour Tuesday yesterday! Thanks to SciGenius’s Alicia, Kong Academy’s Elke and Grasshopper Enrichment Education’s Susan for serving as our panelists who have not only successfully launched live online camps and classes, but also received rave parents’ reviews!

In case you weren’t able to join, here is a summary of the key learnings about conducting online camps and classes from our discussion:

(1) Be brave to experiment, learn by doing, quick iterations lead to quick improvements. Online teaching definitely requires adapting curriculums and new, creative engagement techniques. Successful providers with great parent reviews for their online classes are those who pivoted quickly.

For example, some of these very successful providers attended the first 6crickets Webinar on how to teach online Thursday March 19, decided to launch online classes, worked incredibly hard with their team to reinvent their classes that weekend and launched their first online classes the following Monday. They first experimented with a couple of curriculums and classes with the purpose to learn and to iterate on the curriculum design. Then once successful from the first few classes, they use that experience to expand their efforts to tens of classes and many curriculums in parallel. This is a wonderful proof that fast iterations lead to faster innovation and quicker to perfection!

(2) Record each class for both safety, liability, and quality control. Waiver should include OK to record the video for safety and quality management and ask parents to ensure the setting is suitable for classes and don’t compromise family privacy. Here is a sample waiver you could use and we can revise this together :).

(3) Engage and converse with the kids in your class (including those who don’t want to turn the video on), help them interact with one another, and make it fun!

(4) Mini virtual camps could be great for students; they can be a couple of hours long daily for a week or two. Longer hours would require intermissions and fun challenges or tasks for kids to do off screen and then give them motivation to report back with earned points and other incentives.

(5) Some providers have found ten kids to be an ideal class size for a social and engaging class and some providers have success with 20 students. This highly depends on the topic being taught.

(6) How to get more enrollments? Make your listing attractive to show your professionalism and quality (here is 6crickets checklist for quality listing). Ask parents to recruit more parents to register and ask parents to send in reviews.

We hope that you will join our next Happy Hour Tuesday which happens every two weeks at 9am Pacific Time. Please register here.

Per popular demand, we continue offering our webinar on how to teach online. We now do this every two weeks also on Tuesday at 9am. Please register here.

Please be sure to join our Enrichment Provider Community Facebook group to share your experiences there as well.

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