Hi Everyone, 

Thank you to everyone that joined my in the live session today. I forgot to press record to record the session so I created a short summary of the discussions we had in the session. I will also provides some notes below as well as links to the tutorials we went over. 

Summary of Discussion 

Watch: https://www.loom.com/share/503b7da538ed405190f7d97bd654758d

Instructor Presence

Not limited to direct communication or synchronous sessions, how can you show instructor presence in creative ways? How can we make students feel supported during an online course? Instructor presence is showing up and being there in your online course, so students don't feel they are working through material alone. Students can feel isolated and hesitant to reach out for help during an online course. Creating a strong instructor presence can help students feel that they are supported during their learning experience. 

Some ideas we had:

  • Welcome videos and other short videos.
  • Providing different types of feedback (audio, video).
  • Including instructions and resources in the course.
  • Clear instructions on how to contact/communication with the instructor.
  • Participating/helping facilitate synchronous and asynchronous discussions. 

We also talked about Social Presence. Social presence is created through peer to peer activities and community building. In a face to face class, social presence is more organic. Students engage with one another before, during, and after class. In an online course Social Presence is crafted by the instructor, most students will not engage with other students unless prompted too. For this reason, it is important to incorporate different strategies to build community in the course. This can take the form of:

  • Learning partners (assigning 1-2 learning partners to each student).
  • Icebreakers.
  • Small or large group discussion and/or breakout rooms. 
  • Collaboration tool activities

Lastly, we talked about balancing student interactions in your online course. Online courses often focus on content but, it is important to include a balance of student/student interaction, student/content interaction, and student/instructor interaction. When building your online course this week consider how you balance these different types of interactions? Is your course primarily readings and static content? Or is it mostly live session with the instructor? Are there opportunities for students to engage with one another each week? Students appreciate a balance of live synchronous sessions and asynchronous content and activities. Think about how you can incorporate these types of interactions in both of these settings.

Student/Student Interaction (forums, group activities, collaboration tool activities, breakout sessions etc.)

Student/Content Interaction (readings, documents, videos that aren't created by the instructor)

Student/Instructor (Videos made by the instructor, instructor e-mails or forum posts, one-on-ones, live sessions etc).

If you have any questions, please book a one-on-one with me or post your question to the Q & A forum. 

Here are the tutorials we went over:

Attendance

Moodle Glossary

Activity Tracking

My apologies again, I think all the notes above and the video cover most of our discussion! I will also post this email in Week 2.

All the best,

Micaela


Last modified: Tuesday, 15 June 2021, 2:30 PM