How to Teach Online Classes with WordPress & Zoom

How to teach online classes – has become a widely searched question in these difficult times for teachers, instructors, and coaches.

According to GlobeNewswire, the massive open online course (MOOC) market could be worth $25.33 billion by 2025. Likewise, In 2020, 77% of online students enroll in their programs to help them reach career and employment goals.

Key benefits of teaching online:

• Increased flexibility of time and location: You can take online classes at any time in any location and can also include students from diverse geographical locations. It allows for 24/7 access to class materials, online classrooms, etc.

• Resources: It provides opportunities to access and share information more easily and readily. Also, it provides access to a greater depth of resources and information.

• Cost-effective: Taking online classes makes it the most effective and cheap way of grabbing education. You can save your money, can enhance your knowledge, and also finish all works even if you have lots of stuff to do.

• Diversity: Traditional students are often limited to courses and teachers close to home. But online teaching can enhance the student learning experience by providing various opportunities.

• New skills: Teachers may be limited in their regular access to reliable or appropriate technology. But, by online teaching, you can learn new skills that include the ability to use new software suites, perform in-depth research online, and communicate effectively online in various formats, etc.

No doubt, you can find a lot of information on the internet for online teachings such as Google Classrooms and Microsoft team. However, it is not easy to choose the right and simple option for your immediate needs.

Purpose of taking online classes

The purpose of taking online classes for teachers is to build knowledge and apply understanding for students. For this purpose, they work mostly alone and which can be challenging for them. Like:

• Building a community of learners
• Lack of knowledge
• Comfort level in the use of technology
• Facilitating discussions
• Re-envisioning course goals, activities, and assessments

Most teachers require the following options to convert offline classes into remote teaching experiences:

• A tool to deliver live class
• Option to upload course material
• Assign quizzes and assessments
• Allow students to submit their assignments & projects
• A forum for conveying feedback 

Being WordPress enthusiasts, we believe WordPress, along with Zoom, offers the teacher a robust and straightforward remote teaching option.

In this post, we will walk you through how to convert your offline class to a completely remote solution.  

Moreover, our goal is to provide teachers with a robust and straightforward solution for how to teach online classes to help them and students in these difficult times.

Teachers

• Don’t need to send email attachments
• All course content saved in one place
• They can teach anywhere in the country or the world
• Option for automated marking 
• No monthly payments for individual students 

Students

• All course content stored in one place
• No need to print, complete, and scan
• Upload their work easily if required
• Course or subject progress at a glance
• Automatic badges and certificates

Let’s get started. 

How to Teach Online Classes in Four Steps 

Here is a quick overview of how you can set up a robust and interactive remote class environment in four steps:   

1. Have a WordPress website
2. Install Learndash LMS plugin
3. Create your course
4. Teach live class with Zoom  

That’s it. 

Once you are done with these four steps you are ready to invite students and start your online class. 

Let us show you how to complete these four steps in detail. 

Step 1. Set Up A WordPress Website

According to usage statistics of content management systems, WordPress powers over 60 million websites, or 39.4% of all websites on the internet and 64.1% of all websites whose content management systems are known.

Why you should choose WordPress

There are numerous website builders available out there for teachers. However, WordPress is a full-featured content management system. It is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog.

Moreover, WordPress is easy enough that anyone can use it and many web professionals choose WordPress as the starting point for custom websites.

Features of WordPress

Some core features of WordPress are:

• Mobile-friendly: You can create a mobile‑friendly site with a click, or choose from a selection of responsive themes that look great everywhere.

• User management: In your website, you have a variety of contributors, administrators manage the site, editors work with content, authors and contributors write that content, and subscribers have a profile that they can manage.

• Application framework: You can build an application using WordPress with ease. Moreover, WordPress provides a lot of the features under the hood that your app will need: translations, user management, HTTP requests, databases, URL routing, and much, much more. You can also use the REST API to interact with it.

• Theme customizer: You have an access to do the number of customizations in the theme that you are using. Also, WordPress provides the extensibility to create themes as simple or as complex as you wish.

• Search engine optimization: By default, WordPress is optimized for search engines. In addition, there are plenty of SEO plugins to take care of that for you like Yoast SEO, The SEO Framework, and many more.

And many more.

Pros and Cons of WordPress

If you have a website, chances are you might be already using WordPress. If not, you can build a WordPress website quite quickly. 

You need the following to create your website:

1. Register domain name
2. Get website hosting
3. Install WordPress

If you need help to build your WordPress website, you can get in touch and we will be happy to set you up in no time with your own website. Also, You can check the demo website here. 

Step 2. Install LearnDash Plugin

Once you have a WordPress website up and running, you need to head over to your WordPress dashboard to install LearnDash plugin. 

Why you should choose LearnDash

LearnDash is a flexible and powerful learning management system. Moreover, you can easily sell and manage your online courses on a self-hosted platform that you own and control.

Do you know, there are more than 700 learning management systems available on the market.

Then, why should you choose LearnDash?

So, the one key difference between LearnDash’s and other LMS is that LearnDash is a plugin for the content management system (CMS) WordPress. It is not a standalone solution like other LMS.

LearnDash Vs other LMS

OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation software that converts abandoning visitors into subscribers with dynamic marketing tools. Above all, it is used on 700,000+ websites. Moreover, OptinMonster turned to LearnDash for their LMS to deliver a series of courses teaching tips and tactics. Also, the demands of a high-volume learning program are unique. OptinMonster needed a solution that not only looked great but one that could also scale with its growing customer base. So, the results of using LearnDash were awesome, the company achieved 700k as customers benefit with 6 courses of average 1-hour length each. In addition, the add-ons which were used are the LearnDash plugin, Monster Insights plugin, Yoast SEO plugin, and OptinMonster University Theme.

Further, follow these steps to install and activate the LearnDash plugin.

Step 1: Log in to your WordPress admin panel

Step 2: Go to plugins > add new

Search for the LearnDash plugin.

Step 3: Install the LearnDash plugin

WordPress will now download and install the plugin for you.

Step 4: Activate it

If you have not yet purchased the plugin, you can also do that directly from the LearnDash website. 

You can download the file from your my account page on LearnDash and then upload the zipped file on your WordPress. 

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you will notice that a LearnDash LMS menu appears in your dashboard. 

As you can see, you can use LearnDash to create lessons, topics, quizzes, certificates, assignments, etc. Above all, LearnDash is the most trusted WordPress LMS used for e-Learning websites. 

Features of LearnDash

Here are a few fantastic LearnDash features that make it stand out from the rest of the LMS.

• LearnDash focus mode: The focus mode gives your lessons an instant facelift with just one click. Above all, this is a game-changer and will really help to enhance the learning experience of your students.

• Powerful course builder: Using this easy drag and drop interface you can really enjoy and edit the flow of your course in no time. You can also directly add an unlimited number of topics and quizzes under one lesson.

• Advanced quizzing: You can create quizzes with any type of questions and tweak more settings according to your requirements. Also, you can add a quiz against a specific lesson or course.

• Reusable course content: You can easily reuse any of your course content like lessons or quizzes for any courses you make. You can create the same lessons without setting it up on another page again.

• Other features: You can also include a grade book, course points, certificate & badges on your website. Moreover, it is multi-site enabled, includes automatic email triggers for students, the ability to create and sell course bundles, and many more.

Pros and Cons of LearnDash

Step 3. Create Your First Online Teaching Course

Let’s assume you need to create an English course for year three and following is an outline of your course. 

So, let’s dig in to create your course using LearnDash!

Firstly, click on the LearnDash LMS option from your dashboard. Further, click on courses to create a new course. 

On the top right corner, you will see the Add New button. Click on that to add a create a new course.

First thing first. 

Name your course and add course description. 

When you add the course name, you will automatically see the Course URL. Once done you can assign categories to your course. 

From here you can add the course featured image as well. You have three options: 

• Directly upload from your PC 
• Select an image from your gallery 
• Add images directly from online resources 

Once done, save this before you head over to the builder tab to add content to this course. 

Click on the Builder tab here. 

Adding Content to Your Course  

The type of content that you add to your online teaching classes depends on three things:

1. The type of course, you want to create 
2. Your teaching style and methods 
3. Your personal preference 

Here we are creating an English course for children that are in year three of Elementary school. 

Create And Add Lessons 

Next, you add the lessons/lectures you want to add in each week. 
Just like you created the section, you will add the lessons.

1. Click the New Lesson button
2. Type the name of your lesson
3. Press enter/click the Add Lesson button

Once you have added the lessons, you can re-adjust them to the relevant section. 

You can rearrange your content in the following two way. 

1. Drag and drop it
2. Click on the arrow to move it 

You can easily edit a section heading:

1. Click on its title
2. Make your edits
3. Press enter/click the Save button

You can also remove a section heading just as quickly. 

1. Hover over the section heading
2. Click the red Remove button

In the same manner, you can add lessons in the other sections like the math section we have created here. 

Now its time to add a topic to these lessons. 

Once you add the topic, you’ll find different options to add content in your topics. 

You can add content in any format that you can think of, most commonly it’s in the following forms: 

• Add text 
• Embed videos 
• Images 
• Files (PDFs, Word and PowerPoint)
• Audio files

Add Quizzes 

You would want to take quizzes while teaching online classes.

You can add quizzes in any one of your lessons; simply by expanding the lesson. Click on the Add New Quiz button. 

Like this:

LearnDash has this super cool built-in advanced quiz feature that gives you a lot of freedom and choice in the type of quiz you want to create and add.
You can add:

• Single Answer
• Multiple Choice 
• Sorting, Matching
• Fill-In-The-Blank
• Free Text 
• Survey
• Essay questions 

Adding Quiz Questions

After adding the quiz under the lesson, you can now add the questions.

Don’t forget to save everything first!

Hover over the quiz, and you will see the edit option. 

Click on edit.

This will redirect you to the quiz builder page, that looks like this.

You can find instructions and the quiz details here.

Next, you move to add questions to your quiz. 

For which you move to the Builder tab.

Click on Add New Question and type the Question. 

After which if you expand the question, you can select different answer options from the drop-down menu on the top right corner.

We will walk you through three different question types. 

Single Choice Questions

From the drop-down menu, you can select single choice answer options.
After adding the answers, you have to check the correct option. 

Fill in the Blank Questions

You can add a fill in the black answer and add the correct answer in the following way: 

• For single answer use this parenthesis {answer here}  
• For more than one answers you need to you used these {[answer one][answer two]}

Free choice Questions

You can give add free choice answer option as well. 

Again you can add the correct answer. 

Once you have added all the questions, you need to publish the quiz. 

You need to repeat the steps we mentioned above we will complete the rest of the course according to the outline we had in mind. 

Note: this is just a straightforward example of a course. You can create your course according to your taste and requirements. 

Before you go ahead and publish the course, you need to go over a few setting options first. 

Online Course Access Settings

Once the course is complete, you can select the course access mode from the settings tab.

You have a bunch of different options here; you can set it to: 

1. Open: anyone can access the course without being enrolled 
2. Free: enrollment required to access the course
3. Buy Now: you need to buy the course to access it 
4. Recurring: there is a recurring fee for this course 
5. Closed: only people enrolled by the admin can access this course. 

With LearnDash you have multiple other build in features that you can also explore such as adding a prerequisite to your course or add points required to access your course.

You can also set awards such a badges/certificates on completion of your courses.

You can also add student grade book to your course. 

If your course has an expiry date, you can do that easily in the course settings. 

Once all is done, you can hit the publish button and the course will appear on your website.

Before we move on to how you will teach this course online click here to view the course that we just created. 

Student Enrollment To Your Online Classes

You can choose to enroll students manually to your course or if you want you can keep your course open so your students can enroll themselves.  

How to Enroll Student Manually

To manually enroll your students you will return to your WordPress dashboard and go to user tab. 

 Here are the steps that you will need to follow to create a new user ID. 

Once the user has been added, you need to click on the user and assign them a course from here. 

Select the course you want to assign to them and hit enter. 

Once that student has been enrolled in a specific course it will appear like this. 

Set Auto Enrollment 

If you want your students to enroll themselves, you can activate this feature by clicking on the option below by going into the course settings. 

Once the course auto-enrollment feature is active, your students will have the option to enroll automatically by going to your website. 

Student Dashboard

Now let’s have a look at how the students will view the course. 

Students will go to ‘My Account” from the homepage of your website. 

You can explore our demo website, where we created this course with you.

Click on login. And add their login detail that you will have provided them. 

 Once logged in the students will be able to see their course like this.

The students can view their course progress through out the course. 

Once a lesson has been taken, the students can mark that as complete and move to the next step. 

After taking a quiz the students can see immediately see their results. 

The students will have to re-take the quiz until they meet the passing marks, once that is done the student will be able to move forward with the course. 

Step 4. How to Teach Online Classes Using Zoom

Once you have your course all ready and set up on your website. You can use Zoom to teach online classes and students can complete the quizzes, submit assignments, and maintain their course history on your website.

Why you should choose Zoom

Zoom, a web-based video conferencing tool, allows users to meet online, with or without video. You don’t need an account to attend a Zoom meeting, and the platform is compatible with all devices.

Features of Zoom

• Easy to set up: Zoom is really easy to setup. It provides easy collaboration and participant controls. In short, you don’t need an IT team to roll out and manage Zoom. 

• Modern communication: You can communicate with all students at once and also can have an individual interaction. Its HD video and audio deliver even in low-bandwidth environments.

• Multitasker: Zoom is a single solution for meetings, webinars, phone, and chat. Also, no need to use different tools for performing different activities.

• Reliability: Zoom’s connection quality is more reliable then their rivals. You will never face any kind of issue while using zoom.

• Video Recording: Moreover, if you want to record specific segments of a lesson, the recording software can be turned on and off as many times and each one will be saved individually.

Zoom Vs other conferencing tool

For this, you will need to set up your zoom account if you don’t have one already. You can do that by going to the Zoom website and clicking on the signup button. 

You can sign up to zoom using:

• Sign up with single sign on (SSO)
• link up with Gmail 
• Sign up Facebook 

Live Class Using Zoom 

Zoom allows you to schedule meeting at your preferred time and you can email the meeting link for your students to join the class in advance.

Step 1. Open your Zoom application and click on schedule. 

Step 2. You’ll find plenty of meeting customization when it comes to scheduling your class using Zoom. You can choose your preferred meeting settings and click on schedule to setup your class. 

Step 3: Go live using Zoom at the scheduled class time. Once you are live, your students can join your class using the meeting link you have already emailed. 

Don’t forget to start your online class by going into the meetings tab in your Zoom application as shown in the screenshot below instead of starting a new meeting. 

Now wait for the students to join your class and you will be all set to start your live class using Zoom. 

Handy Zoom Features to Run Your Class Smoothly 

Remote teaching can be challenging at the start but if you are willing to learn new things it can be really fun and productive than a face to face class. 

Below are the few Zoom features, which can really help you take your remote teaching to another level. 

Share Your Screen While Teaching Online Classes

You can share your screen to:

• Use your screen instead of a whiteboard 
• Share PowerPoint or Google slides
• Watch a YouTube video with your students

Zoom Whiteboard &Annotation 

You can your remote teaching to a whole new level with the Zoom whiteboard and annotation feature. 

Raise Your Hand

You can mute your class to run your lecture smoothly. If you choose to mute all your students, the raising hand feature can be really useful if any of your students want to ask a question. 

Conclusion 

We tried our best to show you how to teach online classes, which are: 

• Quick to setup
• Easy to use
• Robust and flexible

Feel free to comment below if you need any help in setting up this remote teaching solution. We will be happy to help as much as possible. 

Source: https://wpsupportdesk.com/blog/how-to-teach-online-classes/

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