Session 3: Running an Online Classroom

The platform matters less than people think, but the settings matter a great deal. Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams all handle teaching; the differences are in free-tier limits, participant numbers and recording. For a Nigerian context the practical considerations are data consumption — video-heavy meetings are expensive for students on mobile data — low-bandwidth behaviour, and whether students can join from a phone without installing anything.

Then the settings that make it a classroom rather than a call. Mute on entry, because late arrivals with unmuted microphones destroy lessons. Waiting room or locked meeting, because an open link gets joined by strangers and occasionally disrupted deliberately. Chat enabled, because it is how quiet students ask questions they will not ask aloud, and it is often where the real confusion surfaces. Screen share restricted to host by default, opened deliberately when a student needs to show their work.

Send the link with the time in a specific zone and the topic named, and send a reminder. This sounds trivial and it determines attendance: a message that says 'class at 6' produces half the attendance of one that says 'Excel formulas, Tuesday 6pm WAT, same link as last week'. Ambiguity is the enemy of attendance, and attendance is the precondition for everything else.

Screen sharing is the core teaching tool online, and most people use it badly. Share one window rather than your whole screen where the platform allows it — it keeps the class focused on the relevant thing, it prevents notifications appearing publicly, and it stops you accidentally revealing an inbox, a bank balance or a private message.

Then prepare the screen before the class. Close irrelevant tabs, turn off notifications entirely rather than relying on do-not-disturb, increase the text size so it is readable on a phone, and have the files you need already open. Most sharing problems are not technical — they are the forty seconds spent hunting for a file while twenty people watch, and the private information glimpsed while looking for it.

Share audio deliberately if the lesson needs it, and check what students actually see. Ask someone to confirm the text is readable, because what is clear on your laptop is often tiny on a phone, and most of your students are on phones. If you are demonstrating software, slow down: screen sharing has latency, and a click that seems instant to you arrives a second later for them.

A teaching presentation is not a document. The failure mode is a slide full of sentences that the teacher reads aloud, which is worse than no slide at all — the class reads faster than you speak, so they are either reading ahead and not listening, or listening and missing the slide. Never put on a slide what you intend to say.

The rule that fixes it: one idea per slide, expressed visually or in a few words, with the explanation spoken. A diagram, a screenshot with one thing circled, a short phrase, a large number. The slide carries the anchor and your voice carries the meaning. If a slide works without you speaking, it is a document rather than a teaching aid, and it should be sent as a handout instead.

Then the practical details. Large text — readable on a phone, which means far larger than feels necessary. High contrast, because low contrast disappears on a cheap screen in bright light. Build slides progressively rather than showing everything at once, so attention goes where you are talking. And number your slides, because 'go back to the one about the formula' is impossible otherwise and it will be asked.

A whiteboard is for thinking out loud in front of the class, which is something a prepared slide cannot do. Its value is that it appears gradually, in response to what the class needs, and it can be changed when someone is confused. A diagram built live while you explain it teaches far better than the same diagram shown complete, because the class follows the reasoning rather than receiving the conclusion.

Keep it simple. Boxes, arrows, labels and a highlighter are enough for almost any explanation. Elaborate drawings waste time and add nothing, and the class is watching you struggle with the pen tool rather than thinking about the concept. Write large, because handwriting on a shared screen is much harder to read than typed text, and write less than you would in person, because small handwriting on a phone screen is illegible.

The whiteboard also solves a specific online problem: it gives you somewhere to put a student's question. When someone asks something, writing it on the board makes it shared rather than private, which means the other four people who had the same question get it answered too. That single habit is one of the largest differences between a good online class and a lecture with a chat box.

Recording lets absent students catch up and lets present ones revisit difficult parts, which is a genuine advantage of teaching online. But three things must be handled. Tell people you are recording, because consent matters and in some contexts it is a legal requirement under Nigeria's data protection framework. Check the recording actually saved — a lesson discovered missing a week later is unrecoverable. And consider what the recording contains, because anything on your screen during it is now permanent: notifications, names, marks, private messages.

Then the failures, which are certain rather than possible. Your connection drops. Have a backup: mobile data ready as a hotspot, and a message pre-written to send by WhatsApp telling the class what to do. The platform fails. Know a second one well enough to move the class in two minutes. A student cannot hear you. Ask the class to confirm audio at the start rather than discovering it twenty minutes in, which is when it is usually found.

The principle is that the lesson must survive the technology. Have the materials downloadable rather than only on your screen, have an asynchronous fallback — a screen recording and a written summary sent to the group — and do not spend the class apologising. A calm 'we have lost the connection, I will send the recording and we will pick up on Tuesday' is professional; ten minutes of 'can you hear me now?' is not, and the class remembers which one you did.