Online asynchronous courses present challenges to faculty and students:
- Online asynchronous communication with learners is often completely text-based, and can suffer from a lack of facial expression, tone of voice, and body language that convey care and attention.
- It’s difficult for you to get to know your online students, so feeling a part of the community is hard for everyone.
- Non-traditional students often have outside pressures and schedules and may not have as much time to cultivate relationships.
Humanizing Your Teaching Presence
Humanizing your course means taking intentional steps to create a human connection with and between learners in your course. Contrast this to learners interacting only with content and the computer interface, without a sense that there is a thoughtful, caring teacher behind what they see in Canvas or elsewhere.
The more you project authentically – is fully socially present – the more comfortable students will feel in also being themselves and engaging. Authenticity builds an atmosphere of trust. You must find ways to selectively share things about yourself outside of academia. Students need to see that you have everyday problems as well as interests and lives outside of your work. It’s important that they have role models who have outside lives and face challenges, but still succeed.
Being selectively vulnerable – sharing parts of yourself that show your humanness without oversharing – sends several messages to students:
- “I won’t judge you if you don’t understand something or if you ask for help.”
- “I don’t expect you to do everything right the first (or second!) time, know everything, or never make a mistake."
- “Looking perfect is not valued in this classroom."
- “You can struggle and still be successful. I have."
- “I will listen to your thoughts with respect.”
- “You can have a life outside of school…it is healthy to do so!”
Social Presence and the Human Condition
"Social presence is defined as the ability of participants in a community to project themselves, socially and emotionally, as real people through a medium of communication."- Garrison and Anderson, 2003
“Human connection is the antidote for the emotional disruption that prevents many students from performing to their full potential and in online courses, creating that connection is even more important.”- Jaggars & Xu (2016)
The 1 minute video below demonstrates why social presence is important in online courses.
Go Deeper
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