How to improve your online learning experience [2 tips]

Many students detest digital classes. Here are a few suggestions to improve your online learning experience as a student or a teacher.

However, please note that the following recommendations are for live interactive sessions between the student(s) and teacher.


These are not relevant if you are a teacher looking at how to produce a recorded instructive video.

Improving your online learning experience ⌲ the video lags!

Many students gripe about the lag in videos when heading into interactive sessions.


This can occur both at the teacher as well as the students end, and the solution is easy to implement.


Which is… to switch off Wifi on your device!


This may come as a surprise, but let me explain.


WiFi is great when you are surfing the internet and you aren’t constantly uploading or downloading data.


However, in the situation when the network is congested with numerous devices communicating with the router at any time (especially when you have smart home devices), you will have to wait your turn. Hence the lag.


The simplest and the cheapest way to ensure you skip ahead of the line, is to buy at least a Cat 6 LAN cable to connect your router directly to your PC/laptop/iPad. The video link explains the important differences between the categories of LAN cable if you want to dwell deeper.


Once you have made the purchase, proceed to connect the LAN cable to the back of your router. Followed by the other end to your computer. Typically there are a few LAN ports available. Be sure to pick the one that is not bringing internet to or from your modem.


Typically, don’t touch the port that is different color to the rest.

For devices without a direct LAN cable, you can purchase a USB C (or whichever USB your device have) to LAN adapter such as 👇🏻

Be sure to turn your WiFi off when using this connection. In addition, you will be happy to note that with these devices, they are typically plug and play. No need to set anything or enable anything in the software.


Of course there are other ways to increase the speed of your connection.


And many of them come with increased costs and technicality.


I only focus on the fastest, cheapest and the MOST direct way to prevent lag.

Improving your online learning experience ⌲ background noise

Background noise can be distracting, not just for you but other compatriots in the class as well.


If you improve on the quality of audio, everyone will have a much better learning experience.


Because audio is more important than video!


Again, you don’t have to be a sound engineer in order to improve the audio.


All you need is a cheap lapel microphone 👇🏻

Not only do they remove the background noise, they can significantly improve your voice without needing to tweak it through software.


You can pair it together with a bluetooth headset but if you do so, make sure to choose the microphone to pick up your voice and the headset to output the audio of the class.


Many headsets come with the microphones and these generally suck. It is better to have a dedicated microphone separate from the headset.


If you are using MacOS for example, you can open the system preferences followed by clicking on the sound tab. Continue to then at the output option, to pick the correct device (typically a headphone) and the input to be the microphone you are speaking into.

Becareful not to use the headphone’s microphones because they are low quality is most cases.

Bottomline

As such, I hope that the 2 simple recommendations can help to improve your online learning tremendously especially in live interactive classes.


Finally, let me know if this has been useful.