It’s just after your first class and the students are filing out of the room and you happen to be standing near enough to catch a few of their comments. You only get snippets of the conversations, but you hear…

In a face-to-face class, your presence is partly defined by your demeanor, persona and actions while in front of the class.

Your presence is further defined when a student comes to your office hours and looks around at the things on your desk (perhaps even the piles of ungraded papers).

This is all well and good for the face-to-face class and even a blended class. The real question is how do you present yourself in a fully online class? What do the students say as they ‘walk’ out of the online classroom for the first time?

“I don’t know how to evaluate an instructor when the class was online. I felt that the emails encouraging better scores, and suggestions on how to improve were very helpful and reassuring, I don’t really know what else to say, it was an online pre-req.

Personally, I found online learning to be much more difficult than learning in a classroom, but that doesn’t have to do with the teacher. I never saw him so I really know nothing about him and the way he teaches, but I guess he was pretty good.”

I will present a few ideas here that may seed some ideas for creating a sense of presence in your online class.

First Impressions

News Pages

When a student enters your online course, the first thing they see is the news page. You can convey a definite sense of presence by simply creating engaging/informative news pages. Sometimes less is more, but a well-structured and informative news page will not only encourage students to read it, but it does say something about you as a professor.

Content Layout

While the learning management system will have a tendency to standardize the layout of your course, the way in which you layout your content can reflect your persona and the mood of the course. Is the layout cluttered and hard to follow? Is it nicely organized by task? Are there a lot of words?

Syllabus

One of the first things most students will read is your syllabus. This is probably one of the biggest ways to convey your persona, not only from an aesthetic standpoint, but also from a professional standpoint. You can be quite firm:

Make up policy: Making up missed work will ONLY be allowed for students with DOCUMENTED excused absences.  If your work is not submitted on time and you do not have an excused absence, you will earn a zero.  Arranging for a makeup deadline is the student’s responsibility.   

*NOTE:  In the past, students have simply assumed late work would be excused.  This is simply the wrong approach.  If anything, you should assume your absence will NOT be excused, until it has been cleared with the Instructor.

Likewise, you can show a little humor and compassion. I particularly like this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

First Impressions

The Quality Matters standards require a suitable introduction by the professor (as well as students introducing themselves to the rest of the class). Many professors create a video self-introduction, either using a professional studio setup or a more casual webcam from your own computer. This may be the only chance that students actually get to meet you ‘in the flesh’. Here are some things to think about as you create that introduction and each of them depend on your own personality and the image you wish to convey to students.

• Do you play it cool and casual?
• Is it a formal, scholarly introduction?
• Do you mention things about your personal life?
• Do you focus on your scholarship and publications?
• Do you share your cell phone number? (some do!)
• Do you use humor?
• Are you stern and foreboding?
• Do you share your passion for the subject matter – which leads us to:

Sharing Your Passion

You are passionate and an expert in your field, how do you communicate that passion, that knowledge, effectively in an online course? As mentioned above, your intro video is the first opportunity to share your passion for the subject matter. You certainly can convey that passion in news announcements and discussion posts. This is probably the easiest for you. Simply doing what you do best, conveying your scholarship in either the written word or recorded videos. The bulk of your content, readings, lectures and references will certainly convey that scholarship. If you do recorded lectures or screencasts, are you formal or conversational? The content and your knowledge in the field will certainly be evident, but also think about the delivery. Here is a video for my Math 100 class that, at least I think so, is somewhat conversational. That said, my students tell me my handwriting is terrible.

You can also have a little fun with the students with engaging activities rather than just regular discussion board posts. In this discussion exercise, all is as expected. However, there is a little twist. The last student to post before the discussion closes gets double points. Post too late and you get nothing!

Showing you care

Your concern for your students shows not only in the classroom but also during your office hours. How do you show students your concerns and convey your interest in their success in an online course?

There are any number of ways to show that you are concerned and engaged with the students. D2L has excellent tools for tracking student progress, even more so in the new version. This report is generated from Edit Course>Track Student Progress. Note that it is color coded and where the performance is lacking, it shows both a color cue as well as indicating through the height of the bars. I use this as management-by-exception.

I use this as management-by-exception. Once you have identified an issue, a follow-up email may be in order.

I watch the user statistics very closely, especially during the first couple of weeks of the quarter and send out frequent emails to let students know I am not only watching their progress but also concerned that they are successful.

Some faculty hold regular office hours using the online rooms. Others schedule one or two phone calls with the students during the quarter. Others have announced that they will be in a campus coffee shop at a certain time and that students are welcome to stop by and chat with the professor about anything. Being online does not mean that you never have the opportunity to meet your students.

Conclusion

You will certainly not be able have the same sense of presence in your online section that you have in face-to-face meetings, but all is not lost. Think out-of-the-box and use some of the suggestions I have discussed to let your presence be felt in the online class. Sometimes the very littlest thing will make a difference.

He was very interactive and willing to comply if anyone encountered any problems with assignments. Responded to emails almost right away. Really seemed to care about our grades and wants us all to pass.