In connection with my previous post, I thought I would share my ideas about the pre/while/post stages of online lessons and courses, and about outsourcing activities in a visual format.
When I started thinking about online lesson and course planning, I had some discussions with a very good friend of mine, and during those discussions, the picture of a beaded bracelet came to my mind that could represent the whole idea! As you can see, each bead represents a stage in lesson- or course planning, and I'm using lesson and course planning together because as you start to take your lesson stages apart, they become parts of a bigger unit, which is the whole bracelet, which represents the whole course!
So, the idea is that we would like to maximise synchronous, live lesson time to provide as much time for practice and discussion as possible. This can also mean, actually, that our live lessons become shorter than their timetabled slot, which makes sense because students are going to work on their own as well, and we don't wish to duplicate their or our own workload either.
To take advantage of live lessons as much as possible, we need to consider outsourcing options. This means that whatever can be done with the help of interactive websites and apps should go either in the pre- or the post-lesson stage (I'm giving you some tool ideas in the third image). As you'll see, even teaching can be outsourced completely, which is the flipped method, by the way, so all you really need to do in the while stage is practice, practice, and maybe revise a bit (but in an enjoyable, fun way).
Something else that can be done with the help of these websites, is making your course completely distant and asynchronous (more on asynch teaching here) by outsourcing the whole while- stage. You should still think in terms of pre- and post-, though! The most important rule of online course planning is that you should still stage your activities that will make up a coherent and logically cohesive whole.
If you feel like learning more about this topic, and you speak Hungarian, consider buying the webinar I did for the Hungarian Association of Language Schools! You can watch the intro here: