Key Tools Every Online Course Educator Should Use

Online course is the future of education. Since 2000, the eLearning industry has grown by over 900% and is showing no signs of stopping. Even in traditional education, 70% of students say online learning is an important aspect of their education.

Yet even as digital learning grows as a market, online educators face many challenges that make it difficult to deliver the best online course possible. There is a lot to overcome, whether it be low engagement, a lack of hands-on learning, challenges with collaboration, or online learning making accurate assessment difficult.

Luckily, with the right tools, you can craft the perfect online course to engage and motivate your students, encourage collaboration, and provide them with practical learning and accurate assessments. 

But how do you know which tools you need?

To help you better understand what you’re looking for, we’ll review every core education tool that can improve online learning. This includes why these tools are useful, what they achieve, and what platforms or apps might provide them.

Here are all the tools every dedicated online educator should use.

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

A train can’t travel without tracks. And, just like a train, your course needs a solid foundation to help it move forward effectively. This foundation allows students to learn linearly and logically without facing distractions or issues. 

Your online course foundation usually comes in the form of a Learning Management System, or LMS. An LMS is a software platform that allows you to manage and deliver your educational courses and content. This should serve as your central hub, hosting most of your course content and integrating with critical platforms such as payment methods and eCommerce platforms like Shopify.

While various LMS platforms have different tools and features available, any good LMS must have a few essential features to be effective:

1. Content Management: You should be able to easily add, edit, and organize all your core online course content and materials, with options to save or push edits to the live version of your course.
   
2. Integration: Your LMS is unlikely to be the only stop on the student’s journey, making integration essential. A good LMS can integrate and connect to various payment solutions, eCommerce platforms, and other learning tools.
   
3. User-Friendly: Your new course platform should be easy to use both for you and your students. On your side, managing content, tracking progress, and integrating tools should be straightforward, while for students, accessing your course should be uncomplicated.
   
4. Mobile Compatibility: Many students, especially younger ones, use smartphones to study and access online content. Because of this, your chosen LMS to sell an online course must be compatible with mobile devices.
   
5. Progress Tracking: It’s challenging to help students learn effectively if you don’t know their progress. Any good LMS should provide progress reports, allowing you to easily see collated assessment results and how students progress through your course.
   
6. Assessment Tools: While you may not choose to host set exams, some form of assessment is required to test student knowledge and ensure they absorb the information your course provides. Ensure your LMS provides robust assessment tools for setting tests, quickly marking results, and giving feedback.
   
7. Community Management: Often underutilized by online educators, growing an active community around your course is essential for driving learner success and satisfaction. Your chosen LMS should provide ample tools to help build a vibrant community, including forum hosting, discussion boards, and various chat options to spark conversation.

How Does Using an LMS Help Online Educators?

Using an LMS instantly centralizes your course management, making it easier to set assignments, add, edit, or remove content, and stay organized overall. With the right features, it also holds many other benefits.

Analytics and progress monitoring help you track student progress, allowing you to provide additional support to those who need it, and adjust your course to better teach students. Not only this, discussion forums and group projects help boost collaborative learning, while some LMS platforms even offer automated grading to help you save time when marking homework or tests.

Overall, a good LMS will help save you time and effort completing administrative tasks, while also adding tangible value to your course by helping students learn more effectively.

Communication and Collaboration Tools

Communicating clearly and effectively with your students in various ways is essential to creating a successful digital course. Almost as important is the ability to host and manage student collaboration.

Without the right tools, this is impossible. With the right tools, establishing communication and encouraging collaboration can become an integral part of your course, and your success.

Important communication and collaboration tools include:

1. Video Platforms: Live discussions or tutor meetings are essential to any online course, so integrating tools such as Zoom or Google Meet into your LMS is vital for boosting student engagement.
   
2. Instant Messaging: Whether between peers or from students to educators, having instant messaging available is critical to effective communication. Slack, Microsoft Teams, or in-built messaging systems on your LMS are all excellent ways to establish fast communication on your course.
   
3. Interactive Documents: Perfect for stimulating collaboration, your students should have access to collaborative documents or interactive whiteboards to enable brainstorming and working together.
   
4. Discussion Forums: Typically a tool found in any good LMS platform, discussion forums are a must-have tool for any successful online course. These help you manage and host a vibrant community, encouraging students to work together in their learning journey.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Communication Tools

Having the right tools is a good start, but you must use them correctly to succeed. Provide students with multiple, simultaneous communication channels, allowing them to reach out whichever way they feel comfortable.

You should also set clear communication guidelines, especially for community forums, to ensure there are etiquette rules and to keep discussions in the correct channels. Post exciting questions or stories in these channels to spark conversations, or assign collaborative work to encourage students to talk to each other.

This will help you create a sense of community, increase customer satisfaction, and enhance their learning.

Content Creation and Curation Tools

Before you can manage your content or spark discussions about it, you need to create it.

Building engaging content that excites and informs your students is the bedrock of any successful course. You’ll need the right tools to create the compelling materials and course resources you want.

Here are all the primary tools you need to create a variety of content types:

1. Video Creation Tools: some LMS platforms, alongside other tools such as Loom, allow you to record your screen and edit videos to create educational content.
2. Infographics: Tools such as Canva or LMS-integrated tools can allow you to create visually appealing graphs, charts, and images to display important information.
3. Presentations: Tools such as Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint are excellent starting points; however, you could also consider tools that allow you to create interactive presentations.

Strategies for Content Creation

Research and understand your audience before creating content, and tailor your course to your student’s preferred learning methods.

Additionally, always use various media types, including text, images, videos, and interactive elements to keep your audience engaged. Keep things as concise as possible, breaking topics down into smaller chunks to enhance learning.

You can also go the extra mile. Update your course content regularly to ensure it stays relevant, and consider adding accessibility elements such as captions to videos to help those with disabilities.

Assessment and Evaluation Tools

You need to implement consistent assessments and evaluations to get your students over the finish line of completing your course. Not only does this help give you and your students an idea of their progress, but it also allows you to provide valuable feedback and alter parts of your course if many students need help.

There are multiple tools available to help you with this:

1. Quiz Makers: From Kahoot! To Google Forms, and even in-built test tools on your LMS, make sure to use a variety of quizzes, tests, and assessments throughout your course.
   
2. Rubric Creators: Create a detailed grading rubric, either manually or through an integrated LMS tool, to ensure that you and your students are clear on the marking criteria.
   
3. Plagiarism Tools: If possible, make use of plagiarism checkers such as Turnitin or Unicheck to ensure academic integrity in your course.
   
4. Peer Assessment: Enable peer assessment via integrated LMS apps to encourage students to think like a marker and learn from each other’s mistakes.

When using these tools, you’ll want to make sure each assessment serves a clear purpose.

Before setting tests, try to create a variety of assessment types such as both formative and summative assessments, all while ensuring each test accurately reflects what students should have learned from your course. Following any exam, always provide timely and useful feedback to help students improve. Wherever possible, encourage students to self-assess, as this will help them master their new knowledge faster.

Student Engagement and Gamification Tools

Even with the best course content and a vibrant community, there are still several tools you can use to help increase student engagement and keep them active on your course.

These include:

1. Certificates: Good LMS platforms such as the Shopify app Tevello offer in-built badging and certification tools, allowing you to create custom certificates to give to students who achieve certain things or complete the course.
2. Gamification: Adding in games, scoreboards, and prizes related to learning content can help keep students engaged and eager to participate in your course.
3. Interactive Video: Some tools and LMS platforms allow you to embed questions and activities into your educational videos, helping students learn more actively.

By integrating these tools more specifically into your content schedule, you can get the most out of gamification elements and certificates, helping motivate students and fostering a greater sense of progress.

Conclusion

Creating a successful, engaging, and informative online course on Shopify is hard, but with the right tools, you can be confident that your students are getting the best experience possible.

While there are hundreds of different learning tools for online educators to use, it all starts with your LMS. If you are looking for a new LMS to host your course and integrate new tools into, the Tevello Shopify app is the perfect platform for you.

See how Tevello can help you improve and manage your course today. Install today from the Shopify App Store and start your free trial.