There has been a transparent explosion of online education in the past few years. Moreover, with the current COVID-19 outbreak, this adoption has grown exponentially forcing educational institutions to shift their activities from offline to online.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced almost all sectors across the globe to pivot, leading to empty schools, workplaces, fitness studios, and religious places. With this sudden shift, many startups are thinking about building and adopting a virtual classroom strategy to survive themselves and help others cope up with the situation.
The concept of virtual classroom plays an important role in providing a great opportunity for students and employees who want to update their knowledge in new competencies.
Not just that, the global virtual market is projected to hit $9,515.2 million by 2025 which itself makes the market quite lucrative to invest in. Virtual classroom training offers a wide variety of advantages to organizations.
In this blog, we will be exploring valuable insights into how to teach online classes through interactive virtual classroom training.
Step by step guide to Virtual classroom design
The performance goals of your virtual classroom can be achieved only if the design and development process is done in the right way. Here is a step by step guide to designing your virtual classroom.
Determine your requirements and goals
When you begin with virtual classroom design, the first thing you want to do is to clearly define your requirements, learning objectives, and performance goals. Determining your objectives and goals will help you guide through the design and development of your virtual class as you can choose the learning materials, tools, and technologies that will serve your objectives and goals.
For example, if you want to enhance the user experience of your learners, you might want to choose interactive learning methods that can help them to get exclusive hands-on learning experience. Besides the objectives and goals, you might also have to determine the skills and core ideologies that will be the core of your virtual classroom.
Here are some of the things to consider:
- Understand your target audience
Find the interests of your target learner base, their current skill sets, and level of experience. Researching these aspects will help you to create good course materials and market your classes effectively.
- Communicate your objectives
It is important to communicate the learning objectives with your learners. Once a student enters your virtual classroom, they must understand what they are going to achieve. Create a clear communication strategy for each online session you take so your students know what to expect.
- Be aware of the desired outcome
You must have an in-depth understanding of what your students will get out of your online classes. This will allow creating the right strategy that consists of necessary tools, information, and activities.
Analyze the necessary conditions to satisfy your learners
The main purpose of assessing the necessary conditions is to satisfy your learner base so that you can adapt a basic infrastructure to develop it. Analyze the current state of conditions, available teaching systems, etc.
By analyzing what is and what ought to be, you must assess the requirement and find the gaps that have to be bridged. Implementing an online version of your current lessons and courses requires some change in administrative policies and procedures.
Select the method of content delivery
To gather the essential tools, you will have to build and run your virtual classroom, it is important to choose the ideal method of content delivery. To decide on this, consider how you learners would be accessing your online classroom.
Will they have to learn on the go via their smartphone or digital devices? Or will the content be delivered to them in a physical classroom blended along with online learning? You also have to choose the right multimedia tools that support the instructional design models you would be adopting. This will allow you to choose the most ideal learning activities that you will need to integrate into your online classroom.
Choose a development method
This is one of the important steps for launching your virtual classroom training. Before launching your virtual school, you must choose the method of development whether you are going to build it from scratch or use white label solutions.
Building your virtual classroom from scratch is required when you have unique business requirements, but it can be an elaborate and expensive affair.
The best recommendation is to develop your virtual classroom using a white label solution which is a readymade script that comes with essential features like basic and advanced tools for creating and managing your courses, admin dashboard, monetization, secure payment integration, multi-language support, etc.
Choose the best online tutoring software so that you can customize according to your business requirements and goals. Livelearn from Pinlearn is one such readymade solution to build and launch your own virtual classroom personalized according to the degree of your choice.
Create interactive learning that encourages active participation
Active participation is the key to a successful virtual classroom experience. The best way to achieve this is to create learning activities that engage your learners and promote them to relate the subject matter the best way possible. Consider integrating learning activities that engage them like presentations, videos, animations, games, etc.
Price your online classes
Manage your virtual training to fit your business model, each class must be created differently based on the value it offers to your learners. Apply different marketing strategies to place your learners in different sales funnels.
The strategy to price your classes the right way is to understand your target audience and price it accordingly. If you need help, analyze the pricing pattern of your competitor brands. If your online classes are better in values than theirs, you can price your lessons even higher.
Promoting your virtual classroom
Once you have a dedicated virtual classroom, you need to promote your online classes to reach your target audience. Create an official brand profile on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to interact with your learner base.
In social platforms, encourage your learner base to engage with the posts you create. You can adapt a blend of marketing techniques like SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. to bring your target audience to your online classroom training.
Give it a test run
Even if you feel that your virtual classroom is perfected and polished, it is recommended to give a test run to make sure everything is running smoothly after the launch. Run a mock session where you can rule out problems if any and ensure that there are no glitches that can restrict the success of your online classroom.
Make sure the registration and login are working right and the content is displayed properly so that you can launch the first online class successfully.
Conclusion
The online education industry has grown exponentially due to the ease of access and learning flexibility, intuitive content, and cost affordability. However, it is really critical to choose the right development partner to help you build a sophisticated online learning system you desire.
To ensure the successful running of your online classroom, make sure you improve the appeal of your classroom at timely intervals to cope up with the constantly changing interests of your target audience. Consider each online class as an opportunity to connect with your learners and deliver a great user experience to them.
Author Bio
Kathy Alameda
I'm working as leading experts on building and implementing the learning strategies. I have led learning & performance improvement projects form last few years.
Currently marketing consultant at https://www.pinlearn.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kathy_alameda
