How to teach live classes online: setup, structure and keeping students engaged

To teach live classes online well you need four things, and none of them is expensive: sound that students can hear clearly, a session plan that has students doing something every few minutes, a way for them to respond without talking over each other, and a record of who came and what you covered. Get those right and a laptop at a kitchen table is a perfectly good classroom.

This guide takes them in the order you will meet them: the equipment that is enough, how to structure a 60-minute session, when to use a whiteboard and when to share your screen, how to use polls, questions and hand-raising, how to handle attendance and recordings, how to schedule across time zones, and what to do when something breaks. It ends with a checklist to run before every class.

Most new online teachers overspend on a camera and underspend on sound. Students will put up with a soft picture for an hour. They will not put up with audio that cuts out, echoes or sounds as if it is coming from the far end of a hallway. Spend your attention in this order: sound, connection, light, camera.

Your room matters as much as your gear. Sit with a plain wall or a tidy shelf behind you, close the door, and silence notifications on the computer you are teaching from. Soft surfaces such as a rug or curtains cut the echo that makes a voice tiring to follow, and they cost nothing if they are already in the house.

The most common mistake in a live online class is to treat it as a lecture with a camera. Online, every student is one click away from something else, and you cannot see the small signs that tell you a room is drifting. The working rule that follows from this is simple: do not talk for more than about fifteen minutes without students doing something, and never let a whole session pass without hearing from them.

Here is the plan applied. Sarah Mitchell teaches Grade 8 algebra to a group of ten. Her goal for the session fits in one sentence: by the end, everyone can solve a two-step equation and check the answer. She opens with a warm-up on screen while students join, one equation from last week. She teaches a single worked example on the whiteboard, saying each step aloud. At minute 25 she puts up a poll: 3x + 5 = 20, with four possible answers, 5, 15, 25/3 and 45. Fifteen is what you get if you subtract the 5 and forget to divide by 3. Three students choose it, which tells her exactly what to explain again. Students then work four problems while she watches, and the last ten minutes are their questions.

Notice what is missing: there is no second topic. One idea, taught, checked and practiced, is a full hour. If you finish early, end early. Students remember a class that respected their time.

The first five minutes do the most work

Start on time, even if only half the group has arrived, and make the first minutes worth being there for. The warm-up question gives early students something to do and tells latecomers that the class has begun. Greeting each student by name as they join is a small thing that students notice, and it doubles as a check that their sound works.

Write the plan with times on it

A plan without times is a list of topics, and a list of topics always runs long. Write the seven parts on one page with the minute each should start, and keep it where you can see it while you teach. When you are five minutes behind at the check, you will know at minute 30 rather than minute 58, while there is still something you can cut.

These are the two ways to show things, and they do different jobs. A whiteboard shows thinking: students watch a solution take shape one step at a time, at the speed of your hand. Screen share shows the real thing: a document, a spreadsheet, a piece of software or a website, exactly as students will see it on their own computers.

On the whiteboard, write larger than feels natural, because some students are watching on a phone. Keep one idea per board and start a fresh page rather than erasing, so that you can go back when someone asks about an earlier step. Say each step aloud as you write it. If you write a great deal, a pen tablet is the upgrade to consider before any camera.

When you share your screen, share a single window rather than your whole desktop, so that a stray notification or an open inbox never appears in front of the class. Enlarge the content to 125% or more. Move the cursor slowly and say what you are about to click before you click it. And stop sharing when you want a discussion: a shared screen pushes faces to the edge of the window, and people talk more readily to faces.

It helps when both live in the same place as the class. In Prolaud's live classroom the whiteboard is a tab beside the video, and screen share is a button in the same room, so you are not asking students to open a second tool in the middle of a lesson. The whiteboard stays hidden from students until you choose to show it, and you decide separately whether they can draw on it, which keeps a shared board from filling with doodles while you are explaining.

In a physical room you read faces. Online you need tools to do the same job, and each of the three common ones answers a different question.

The last row deserves a note. Asking everyone to type an answer and send it on your signal means the quick students do not set the answer for the rest, and you get a response from every person rather than from the two who always speak. It works with nothing more than a chat box.

Two habits make all of these work. First, wait. After you ask a question, count silently to seven before you say anything else. It feels long to you and normal to the students, who need the time to unmute or type. Second, use names. "Lucas, what did you get for the second one?" gets an answer where "Does anyone have the second one?" gets silence. Tell students at the start of the course that you will call on people, and that a wrong answer is useful to the whole class, so that being named does not feel like being caught.

On Prolaud these are built into the classroom rather than added on. You can launch a live poll with two to four options and watch the results come in, students can post questions to a Q&A list and upvote the ones they share, and raised hands appear to you in a queue ordered by who raised first. More detail is on the live classes page.

Engagement is not energy or entertainment. It is whether students are thinking about the subject. The structure above does most of the work, and a few habits do the rest.

• Give every student a job in the first ten minutes. Someone who has already typed an answer is far more likely to type the next one.
• Make being wrong normal. Thank students for wrong answers and use them to teach. A class where only correct answers are welcome goes quiet quickly.
• Do not make cameras a rule. Invite cameras on and explain why you like to see faces, but let students decide. Some are on a weak connection, some share a room, and a student who feels watched is not learning better.
• Change what students are doing, not just what you are saying. Moving from your explanation to your second explanation is not a change. Moving from listening to solving is.
• Refer to their work. "Maya's solution to the third problem is worth a look" tells every student that the work they hand in gets read.
• Follow up on absence the same day. A short message to a student who missed class, with the recording and the task, is the cheapest way there is to keep them in the course.

Take attendance in every live class, and do not take it by hand. Reading names aloud costs teaching time, and a screenshot of the participant list records who was there at one moment, not who stayed. What you want is a record made automatically: who joined, when, for how long, and what the class was about.

Use the record to help, not to police. Its best use is spotting the student who has missed two sessions in a row while there is still time to write to them. Its second use is settling questions later: a parent asking whether their child attends, or your own decision about who has earned a certificate. For either, a student who joined for five minutes should not show up as present for the hour. We go into how to count this fairly in live class attendance, measured honestly.

In Prolaud, attendance is written as the class runs, from the teacher's view of the room, so it includes people who joined from a link without signing in. You can add the topic you taught to each class and export the record as a CSV or a PDF.

Record by default. A recording helps the student who was absent, the student who was present but lost at minute 20, and you, when you watch ten minutes of yourself and notice that you never paused for questions. Tell students at the start of the course that classes are recorded, and say who can watch the recordings and for how long.

• Post the replay the same day, while the class is still fresh and the assignment is still ahead.
• Add three or four timestamps: where the worked example starts, where the practice starts, where the questions start. A student looking for one step will not watch an hour to find it.
• Send absent students the replay with the task, not the replay alone. "Watch from minute 10 to minute 25, then do problems 1 to 4" gets done. "Here is the recording" does not.
• Decide how long recordings stay up. Until the end of the term, or for as long as the student is enrolled, are both reasonable. Choose one and say so.
• If you teach children, ask a parent's permission before you record, and check the rules that apply where you and your students live.

A replay is a safety net and a review tool. It is not a replacement for the class, and if most of your students watch later rather than attend, that is a signal about the time slot or the session itself. On Prolaud you start the recording from the host view, and finished recordings are collected in a recordings library. With any tool, find out before your first class where the file goes and who can open it.

As soon as you teach students in more than one region, the clock becomes part of your lesson planning. Start by writing down where your students are, then test candidate times against each place. The table shows how one Eastern time looks elsewhere.

Read down the table and the trade-off is plain. A noon Eastern class works on both sides of the Atlantic and is early but possible on the West Coast. A 7:00 PM Eastern class suits working adults in North America and nobody in Europe. There is no slot that suits every continent, so decide whose time you are designing for and say so on the course page.

• Always write the zone. "Tuesdays at 12:00 PM Eastern" rather than "Tuesdays at 12". Add a second zone if you have many students in one other region.
• Send a calendar invite for every class. A calendar converts the time for each student and keeps doing so when the clocks change.
• Keep the same slot every week. A class that moves is a class people miss.
• If no single slot works, alternate two, so that the awkward hour is shared instead of always falling on the same students.
• Offer a second, shorter question session at a different hour for students who can only watch the replay.
• Ask for each student's time zone when they enroll. It is one field on a form, and it turns scheduling the next course from a guess into a count.

Something will go wrong in your first few classes. Nearly all of it falls into a short list, and each item has a fix you can apply while students wait and a habit that stops it happening again.

When something breaks in front of students, say what is happening in one sentence and give them something to do: "My screen share has stopped. Try problem 2 while I fix it." Thirty seconds of silence with a task feels like teaching. Thirty seconds of silence with no explanation feels like the class has ended.

Run the same checks before every class until they are automatic. They take less time than recovering from any one of the failures above.

The day before

• Write the goal of the session in one sentence.
• Write the plan with a start time for each part.
• Prepare the warm-up question, the poll and the practice task.
• Send a reminder with the time, the zone, the link and anything students should bring.
• Open every file, slide and website you plan to show, and close the ones you do not.

Fifteen minutes before

• Restart the browser and close every tab and app you do not need.
• Put on headphones. Test the microphone and the camera, and listen to how you sound.
• Check the light on your face and what is visible behind you.
• Silence notifications on the computer and the phone.
• Open the class link on your phone as a backup.
• Open the whiteboard and the window you will share, and have the poll ready.
• Put water within reach and the plan where you can see it.

In the first two minutes

• Start the recording and tell students it is running.
• Ask one student to confirm they can hear you and see what you are sharing.
• Put the warm-up question on screen.

After class

• Post the replay, the assignment and the deadline in one message.
• Note the topic you actually covered next to the attendance record.
• Write to anyone who was absent.
• Write down one thing to change next time, while you still remember it.

Prolaud runs part of this for you. The host page has a pre-class check that tests your camera and microphone before you go live, and students get a quick device check for camera, microphone and speakers before they join, which moves the "can you hear me?" minutes out of the lesson.

If you have not taught live before, do not make the first paid session your first session. Run a 30-minute practice class with three people who are on your side: a friend, a colleague, a former student. Teach one small idea using the full structure, with a warm-up, one explanation, one poll, one task and questions. Record it and watch it once.

You will learn more from that half hour than from another week of preparation. You will find out how you sound, how long your explanation really takes, whether your screen is readable, and how it feels to wait in silence for an answer. Fix the one or two things that stood out, then teach the real class. If the real class is the first session of a course with a fixed group, the guide to running a cohort-based course covers what happens between the sessions.

• How to run a cohort-based course: a week-by-week playbook
• Live class attendance, measured honestly
• Student retention in online courses: how to get students to finish
• What it costs to run your classroom and your checkout as two systems
• Live classes on Prolaud: the room, the tools and the recording