How Educators Grow Technical Skills for Online Courses: A Veteran Teacher’s Experience
It was 7:12 p.m. last March, and I was staring at my laptop at the kitchen table, coffee gone cold, Cheeto crumbs from my 10-year-old’s homework session scattered across my professional development notebook. I’d signed up for the district’s mandatory 8-week online course on our new learning management system, convinced I’d knock it out in a long weekend. Eighteen years teaching 7th grade science, I’d navigated three different LMS switches, flipped classrooms, and a full year of pandemic remote learning—how hard could one technical course be? Very hard, apparently, if you’re trying to figure out how to embed a quiz into a pre-recorded lab demo and every generic tutorial video just says “click the embed icon” like I know exactly which embed icon they mean. My colleague texted 10 minutes earlier: “I just fake-watched week 3’s video and got my credit. No one checks.” I almost did the same.
I’d been doing that for years, with every required technical PD course. Check the boxes, get the required hours, move on. Growing as an educator when it came to online course tech always felt like something that happened to other people—the young teachers fresh out of college who know all the latest apps, the ones who post their fancy interactive lessons on Instagram. I just wanted to get through the semester without another day where we waste the first 15 minutes of class waiting for me to fix my screen share. That night, though, I noticed the course had an optional 30-minute live Q&A scheduled in 10 minutes. I was already stuck, so I logged in.
There were only 7 other teachers there, and the facilitator was a 22-year-old recent grad named Lila who didn’t act like she knew everything. When I raised my virtual hand and said what I was actually trying to do—get my hybrid kids, the ones learning from home because of colds or quarantine, to predict the chemical reaction before I demo it, so I could see who got the concept before we moved on—she didn’t just point me to the help center. She shared her screen, pulled up my exact course page, and walked me through a tiny shortcut I’d never seen: inserting the quiz question directly into the video timeline, so it pops up mid-demo instead of forcing kids to navigate to a separate page after. It took 3 minutes, and it worked perfectly for my next class.
After that, I started thinking differently about how we actually grow when it comes to technical skills for online teaching. I used to think it meant mastering every feature of every tool we’re given, or completing every module of every course in order, just like we ask our students to do. But that’s not what works, for most of us. A month later, my friend who teaches 2nd grade told me she’d dropped out of a 6-week course on interactive digital whiteboards halfway through. She said all the lessons were about using fancy animated stickers and game features that would’ve taken her an extra hour of prep every night, and she just didn’t have time. Then she went back a week later just to watch the 10-minute video on shared student annotations, because she wanted her remote kids to be able to draw their phonics words along with the class. That one 10-minute section cut her prep time in half and made her remote kids way more engaged. That’s the growth, right? Not checking all the boxes, but pulling what you need when you need it.
I’ve started doing three small, concrete things that make any technical online course actually useful, instead of just a waste of time. First, I don’t watch every video in order anymore. I write down the one specific problem I’m trying to solve before I open the course, then I search the content for that problem and skip everything else. If I need to figure out how to moderate student comments on the class stream, I don’t sit through an hour-long module on all the stream settings. I just go straight to the 5-minute video on comment moderation, do it, and close the tab. Second, I go to every optional live Q&A, even if I only have one question. I used to skip them because I didn’t want to sound dumb for not knowing something obvious, but nine times out of ten, half the people on the call have the same exact question. And you get answers that fit your specific class—if you teach 30 middle schoolers like me, you get tips for managing big groups, not the generic tips for 15-person college classes that are in the pre-recorded videos. Third, I meet my grade level team for 10 minutes after we finish a course module, and we each share one thing that actually worked for us. No one has to talk about the stuff that didn’t. Last time, I shared the quiz embedding trick, and the 6th grade ELA teacher shared how to set up auto-reminders for missing assignments that go straight to parents, which saved me two hours of emailing every week.
For parents reading this, this matters more than you might see from the outside. When teachers grow their technical skills for online courses the right way, you don’t get a fancy lesson with 100 unnecessary animations. You get your kid who’s out sick with strep able to participate in class just like they’re there, instead of getting a 10-page packet of worksheets to catch up on when they’re feeling better. You don’t get 15 missed minutes of instruction at the start of every hybrid day while the teacher fumbles with broken links. It’s not about making teaching “easier” for us—it’s about making learning more consistent for your kid.
I’m still not what anyone would call a tech expert. Last week I accidentally muted the entire class during a guest zoologist talk and couldn’t figure out how to unmute everyone for two whole minutes. I’m halfway through a new course on hybrid grading right now, and I haven’t watched two thirds of the modules. I don’t need to. I just need to figure out how to auto-grade exit tickets so I can stop staying up until 9:30 p.m. grading them every night. Next week’s Q&A is open, and I’m signed up. We’ll see what sticks.
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