How Do Educators Grow Their Technical Skills for Online Courses? A Parent’s On-the-Ground View
7 PM on a Tuesday in October, my kitchen table is still covered in my teen’s leftover soccer socks and an open bag of Goldfish crackers, when my friend Lila slams her laptop shut hard enough to make my coffee mug jiggle. Lila’s a 10th grade biology teacher, has been for 18 years, and that night she was working her way through the district’s mandatory online technical course for teachers who run hybrid and fully online classes. “Thirty minutes of video telling me why discussion boards are important, and one 10-second clip that skips the step I actually need,” she said, leaning back and rubbing her temples. “I just want to embed my new virtual dissection simulation so my online kids don’t get sent to a random ad site when they click the link. Is that too much to ask?”
I volunteer on our district’s family-teacher support committee, so I’ve heard this same frustration from dozens of teachers since we added permanent online course options a few years back. For students who need flexible scheduling—kids with chronic health issues, competitive athletes, students who struggle with overcrowded in-person classrooms—these online courses are a lifeline. But to run them well, teachers need solid technical skills, and most districts are still figuring out how to help educators grow those skills the right way. For years, our district spent big money on generic pre-recorded online technical courses that teachers complete for professional development hours. Lila had already finished two of those, and she still couldn’t sort out the embedding step for her simulation. The courses spent hours talking about educational theory, skipped over the specific steps for our district’s customized version of Canvas, and by the time Lila sat down to actually do the thing she’d learned, she’d forgotten half of it anyway.
Earlier this year, the district got a small grant to try a different model. Instead of 8-hour self-paced courses that cover every possible tech tool, they offer 90-minute after-school small group sessions that meet every two weeks. Teachers sign up based on exactly what they need for their own online course that semester. If you need to add auto-grading to your quizzes, you sign up for that session. If you just need to learn how to add closed captions to lecture videos, that’s a separate session. No extra fluff. Lila signed up for the embedding interactive content session just to check off her PD requirement; she didn’t expect to actually walk away with it done.
I sat in on that session as part of my volunteer work, so I saw how it went. Seven teachers total, from 4th grade to 12th grade, all with their own laptops open to their own live course pages. Stale chocolate chip cookies from the teacher’s lounge sat on a back table, and someone had brought a extra pack of extra Sharpies for no particular reason. The facilitator didn’t start with a lecture. She went around the table, each person said what they needed to have finished by the end of the hour and a half. Then she worked through each person’s problem one by one, projecting their screen and walking through each step, while everyone else worked on their own tasks at their own pace. When Lila hit a snag with the privacy settings that would have locked her students out of the simulation entirely, the facilitator clicked through it with her right there, in two minutes. No “check the Canvas help docs” that go off into a million unrelated links. After the session, everyone got added to a low-pressure group chat where you can post a screenshot of an error anytime, and someone gets back to you within 24 hours.
As a parent, I used to wonder why it took teachers so long to get online courses running smoothly. I thought maybe they just didn’t want to learn new stuff. But sitting in that session made it clear: the problem wasn’t the teachers, it was how we were asking them to learn. Growing technical skills for online teaching isn’t about becoming a tech expert. It’s about solving small, specific problems that make your class work better for your students. Generic one-size-fits-all courses don’t do that. This model does.
For teachers or school leaders looking to make this work, it’s three simple, low-cost changes that don’t require a huge budget. First, only ask teachers to learn technical skills they actually need right now for their own class. Don’t make everyone take a full course on every tool if you only need one function this semester. Second, let teachers work on their own course content while they learn, instead of practicing with generic sample files. Watching someone embed a sample quiz doesn’t teach you how to embed your own quiz. Third, keep an open space for questions after the training ends. Most people forget half the steps a week later when they go to do it again, so a simple group chat where you can post a screenshot is way more useful than a hundred-page guide.
A month after that session, Lila launched her updated online biology unit. My son Sam takes the class online because he swims competitively and can’t make the 9 AM in-person lecture slot. He came home one night after practice and mentioned that the dissection worked on the first try, no broken links, no extra clicks. Sam has ADHD, so if an online assignment takes more than two taps to get to, he usually gives up and closes the tab. That small change, Lila learning one skill the right way, meant he turned in his first full lab report of the semester on time.
It’s not a perfect solution. Lila still texts me blurry screenshots of error messages when she gets stuck after hours. She still says she’s “not a tech person” and gets frustrated when the district updates Canvas and changes all the button locations. The grant for this pilot runs out next school year, and no one has committed to funding it long term. Most big education companies still push those big generic courses because they’re easy to scale, even if they don’t work. But right now, teachers are growing, one small technical problem at a time, and that’s making a real difference for kids like mine. We don’t need all teachers to be tech experts. We just need them to be able to learn the small things they need, when they need them. That’s the part no one talks about when they talk about online courses and teacher training.
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