The first aspect of a virtual teaching strategy is proper preparation. While a traditional teacher might focus their preparation on creating lesson plans to teach in the classroom, e-learning instructors take a different approach. Rather than focus on what they should teach, they create a comprehensive study plan that focuses on what students should learn. 

Keep in mind that online courses rarely conduct live video lectures. If lectures are used at all, they are considered supplemental archives. Instead, the real focus of online education is the work that learners complete through reflective journals, formal papers, text-based dialogues and project portfolios. This means that long before the course starts you need to create a well designed mix of prepared readings, assignments and assessments. Then you will upload these into a web-based course management system, such as Web-CT or Blackboard. 

This switch from a teacher-dominated classroom to a learner-centered format will require you to rethink your role. Online instructors are more akin to coaches, facilitators and guides, rather than lecturers. Faculty who switch to learning-centered formats often come to characterize education, not as the teacher transmission of content, but as the student construction of knowledge through "questioning, criticism, discussion and deliberation" (Brookfield & Preskill, 1999, p. 198).