In this recent Mashable post about The Future of Teaching, Josh mentions that online learning environments have been shown to be more effective than face to face teaching. I’ve been talking about this for years – it is not in the future, it is now. I and many others are already doing this.

A simple way to start teaching online is to post a video of yourself on YouTube or create a blog with educational blog posts, or post to your Facebook page, etc. Or you can start using video chats like Skype or MSN Live Messenger to teach students via webcam. But the most exciting approach is to create your own online learning environment.

An online learning environment is typically a members-only area that not only contains content in a variety of formats (such as video, audio, text, diagrams), but often creates an online community with fosters collaboration. For example, this could be a discussion forum where students can discuss the course content, or where you accept submissions of assignments via a student section. It’s a great place to put all your content, and organize your thoughts and overall systematic approach to your content. You charge a monthly fee for access, and continually add more content and refine existing content.

To actually implement this, you could use open source virtual learning environment software such as Moodle (free). You can often get this software installed easily via your web host, such as GoDaddy or Hostgator. There are many free applications that these hosts provide with easy one click installations so that you don’t have to set up databases or ftp a ton of files to the server.

After trying Moodle for a while, I decided to go with Wordpress (free) which I am very familiar with for all my websites. You can structure a series of web pages in a hierarchy – so I have 7 courses with several lessons within each course. These are known as subpages. Moodle didn’t have a very good integration with any payments systems which became a problem and had lots of extra things I didn’t need. So I am now using Wordpress with the Wishlist Member plugin to protect my pages, send emails to members, take payments (via Paypal) and integrate with my email autoresponder (GetResponse).