Five Free Online Educational Lectures And Courses For Teachers

Being a teacher can be both demanding and rewarding at the same time. The demand comes in when marking papers, ensuring everyone understands a concept, and learning new concepts at the same time. However, unlike other kinds of jobs, teaching has no retirement limits, and that might be one of the reasons why everyone seemingly becomes a teacher of some sort after retirement.

With the advent of the internet, teaching has taken a completely different turn. More and more people can now become teachers, and students don’t have to be glued to classrooms for them to get education. Both new and old teachers can perfect their skills and increase their knowledge by relying on free resources found on the internet.

Listed below are five free online resources where teachers can perfect their teaching skills.

1. Edutopia – Teacher Development: Starter Kit for Teaching Online

If you want jump into the online world and start an online teaching career, Edutopia is a great place to start. Its Starter Kit for Teaching Online equips teachers with basic skills on what online learning is all about and provides them with a foundation on which they can become great teachers in the online world.

The fun thing about Edutopia is that it incorporates quality resources from various universities and websites, resulting into a rich source of information for teachers who basically want to get to know where to start with teaching online.

One thing that you should know about online teaching is that it is usually advised that before a teacher plunges into the world of online teaching, he/she must have a sort of pre-experience so as to find the whole process easy. On that note, Edutopia ensures that you have plenty of free online tools for perfecting what you learn online.

If you would want to follow this path in your quest to become a better online tutor, you can visit this link to register for the free online course about how to teach online.

2. Thirteen Ed Online – Cooperative and Collaborative Learning

Thirteen Ed Online is yet another fantastic place to further your teaching skills at your own pace. It offers a number of free workshops which allow current teachers to become better at what they do.

Thirteen Ed Online’s Cooperative and Collaborative Learning enables instructors to learn about different ways of enhancing the learning experience of students by introducing them to group work. In this free online course, a teacher is presented with some of the advantages of having his/her students divided into small and manageable groups.

Additionally, this course helps teachers to learn effective ways on how to improve the performance of weaker students.

Thirteen Ed Online also offers teachers with yet another free online workshop course called Tapping Into Multiple Intelligences. This course is partly similar to Cooperative and Collaborative Learning, however, Tapping Into Multiple Intelligences focuses more on making all the students good in the fields that they enjoy.

In this course, a teacher learns about the nine different types of intelligences and how to unearth hidden potentials from students. Besides that, teachers have also been included with a free resource that allows them to earn a professional credit that is recognized beyond the website.

You can enroll for the free Cooperative and Collaborative Learning from Thirteen Ed Online here. Moreover, you can also check out Thirteen Ed’s Tapping Into Multiple Intelligences course.

3. The Open University – Careers Education and Guidance

Tethering a student to a career that is not within his/her interests can cause disastrous effects in a student’s future. While it is common for society to expect a student to know what he/she wants in the long run, a good number of students all over the world don’t know which career options they have, and they might end up choosing wrong careers if not guided.

The Open University offers free course materials which help teachers become better advisers in the topic of careers. The Careers Education and Guidance is packed with plenty of resources such as videos, interactive games, and articles which in turn help teachers to discover new ways of guiding their students as they explore the different careers that await them in the outside world.

Besides Careers Education and Guidance, The Open University also has another free course that is equally useful for teachers who want to ensure that the students enjoy the learning process.

Using Film Music in the Classroom allows teachers to learn effective way of using videos to enable students to master what they were taught in class.

Potential instructors can also benefit from this course since it shows them the connection between music and image and the importance of incorporating the two in a learning process.

Though these courses are particularly helpful for teachers who advice students on their career paths, it is worth noting that while these two courses are still non-academic credit courses.

For the Careers Education and Guidance, click here.
For the course Using Film Music in the Classroom, visit here.

4. University of California – Irvine – Building the Parent Teacher connection

As a teacher, the student is not your only concern when it comes to education, but parents too. Building the Parent-Teacher Connection is thus a useful non-credit course that enables teachers to learn how to cooperate with the parent so as to ensure that the student is the ultimate beneficiary.

The hour-long video provides teachers with some of the basic things that might be overlooked while discussing about a student’s performance, behavior, or even attitude.

Apart from Building the Parent-Teacher Connection, the University of California-Irvine also has another free and credited course called the Gifted and Talented Education Seminar Series.

Basically, this is targeted at helping teachers understand different ways of dealing with talented and gifted students in their classes. It is a four-part series that establishes how to support gifted students, and it also comes with images and audio to help along with illustration.

Teachers who have run out of ideas on how to effectively teach differentiation to their students will enjoy the free non-credit course – What Differentiation should Look Like. Though it is an hour-long video, it enlightens teachers with new ideas on how to make differentiation seem easy and manageable to students who are having a hard time with it.

Here are the links to the free teaching courses offered by the University of California-Irvine:
What Differentiation Should Look Like
Building the Parent-teacher Connection
Gifted & Talented Education Seminar

5. University of Southern Queensland – Teaching Students with Special Needs

In any learning institution, teachers often come across students that require special attention maybe due to physical or mental disabilities. While it may not be too demanding to teach students with special needs, some background knowledge will actually make things much easier.

Teaching Students with Special Needs is a course offered by the University of Southern Queensland that prepares teachers to deal with students of all ages who suffer from behavioral problems.

This course not only looks at ways of detecting the particular students that need special attention, but it also enables the teachers to learn more about the corrective management model.

After completing this OpenCourseWare class, however, a teacher will not receive any credit whatsoever, but judging by its importance, this is one course that will benefit teachers of all kind.
You can enroll for this free online course by visiting this link.

All in all, there exist hundreds of online courses that could help teachers become better at teaching. These courses could be in any field such as Engineering, Medicine, or even Business. However, without learning about effective ways of teaching, you really won’t be enriching your students with knowledge. Knowing how to deal with all kinds of students in your class and determining effective ways to make each and every student to learn with a passion is one way to become a better teacher.