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Sharing experience about online teaching: Three years ago I had to set up an online MS class in international economics. I was very inefficient in the beginning but after a while I learned a few lessons that helped the job. 1/n
This course was previously taught by @davidhummels who shared his videos with me. My reaction was: how possibly I could produce anything close to that. I learned that I should not try to replicate the best teachers, but find a way in line with my own style, taste & abilities. 2/n
Bringing my own taste, one thing that helped was a very accurate organization of course material. This is important in online teaching because students will always know precisely what to read/watch/listen from where and how they are connected to HW. 3/n
I ended up giving them a weekly study guide. This is for the 1st part. 4/n
In recording videos, divide a lecture into many sub-lectures, each 10-15 min. Students' span of attention is short. This also helps later if you want to reshuffle the organization of material. Also helps to redo a video. Imagine sth goes terribly bad min 45 vs min 10. 5/n
Accept that sometimes you might misspeak during a video, or have a long pause to regain focus, or are somehow far from perfection. If you don't, you build a bad habit of wanting to record a video again and again. 6/n
Do not try to edit your videos, like cutting the parts you don't like and such. That's another bad habit that will slow you down. Also, imperfections here and there make your online videos feel more natural. 7/n
If you are recording on slides, do not write in the first slide: Econ 450 - Fall 2020. Write it in the caption of your video. You may want to use your videos in the future and in a different class! 8/n
Try to provide a short motivation slide/note/video before teaching a topic. In online, students easily get confused the motivation for things they are learning. For example, this is what I share before assigning @rodrikdani (JEP, 2000). https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.14.1.177 n/n
