People often ask how they can study with me when I am in the UK. It used to be genuinely difficult. Now you can study not only with me but with plenty of teachers abroad, and distance is no longer the obstacle. Here are a few things I have learned about online study. Most of it applies to online meetings too.
Setting up the room
Start with light and quiet. You do not need a room to yourself, but you do need to keep the noise down enough that it does not eat into the lesson.
Keep your microphone on rather than muted. It sounds small, but it protects the interaction. If you stay muted and only unmute to answer, those three to five seconds of fiddling with the controls break the rhythm of the class every single time.
Keep the camera on for the whole lesson too. Class activities involve a lot of discussion, learner to learner as well as teacher to learner. Frame your face in the centre with your mouth clearly visible, so the teacher can correct your pronunciation and follow how you are practising.
A computer is effectively required. If yours has no camera, use the computer to work and your phone to join the call. Class activities lean on online documents and tools that a phone simply cannot handle.
Remember that when you learn a language, communication is the skill that matters most.
Spending class time on the right things
The Cambridge CELTA approach is built around maximising the time learners spend actually using the language: roughly 80% learner talking time to 20% teacher guidance. So keep your engagement as high as you can. If you do not know an answer, say "I don't know" or "I don't think I know the answer" quickly and clearly rather than going silent and stalling the class. That is exactly how you would handle it in real conversation anyway.
The way I teach online, class time is for interaction. The drilling happens daily at home through a Personal Folder I design, covering all four skills: Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing.
For Listening and Reading I follow one rule: anything you can do at home should never be done in class. I update the exercise files weekly. Students work through them, check their own answers and correct their own work against the materials provided. Only the questions that still do not make sense after correcting, the ones where you cannot see why the answer is False rather than Not Given, get brought to class. That beats sitting and watching a whole class work through a paper while the teacher reads answers aloud, which burns hours.
Time you do not waste in an online class is money back in your pocket.