3.8 Developing Instructor Presence

Developing Instructor Presence

To develop your instructor presence, you must formulate how you want to construct your instructor persona as you are working with students through technology. Think about your most memorable instructor (in any grade). Why and what made them memorable? How did they impact you and the rest of the class?  Can you emphasize those kinds of interactions in your remote course, at a time when students might feel distanced from the OSU community?  No matter what your teaching style, you can demonstrate that you are present and available to your students, even if you are not in the physical classroom together.

How To Facilitate Instructor Presence

You can facilitate instructor presence in your Canvas site in a number of ways. We will summarize ways to establish a presence, maintain this presence utilizing your communication strengths, and establish guidelines for interaction/communication.

Instructor Presence in Action

Ashlee Foster from Oregon State University’s Ecampus Course and Development and Training unit compiled a list of ways to establish and maintain a presence in the blog post, "Curating Instructor Presence in Online Education" (2018). Listed below is a brief summary.

Establishing Presence:

• • Welcome announcements
  • Introduction videos, letters, or discussion postings
  • Construct an "About Your Instructor" page in Canvas
  • Create a course overview and expectations video (see more about videos on 3.7 Multimedia: Making & Sharing Videos)
  • Provide virtual office hours or schedule individual appointments with learners
  • Personalize your language to humanize the learning experience
  • Establish guidelines for interaction,  online communication (see Core Rules of Netiquette Links to an external site.), timeliness, and what to do about absences

Maintaining Presence:

• • Utilize breakout rooms or recommend study sessions in Zoom to offer group collaboration on complex learning activities.
  • Regularly send updates, reminders, and check-ins via announcements or emails. Announcements are a good way to expand upon insights and provide relevant resources.
  • Provide a General Q&A discussion board in Canvas to promote feedback and student-to-student and instructor-to-student communication.
  • Present content in diverse ways: videos, audio including podcasts, social media.
  • Engage in course discussions and group activities that apply learned concepts to real-world problems.
  • Ask learners to submit potential exam questions and pick a few to insert into the exam. This fosters engagement and allows instructors to get a sense of learner mastery of content.
  • Engage in solicited feedback from learners through non-graded quizzes or anonymous surveys and apply feedback to course instruction/design/presentation (or explain why not).
  • Provide prompt individual feedback or engage in individualized communication to praise high-achievers or offer individualized assistance to struggling learners via email or other private forms of communication.

"Humanizing" Your Remote Course

Effective remote and blended facilitation ideally includes your presence, your empathy, and your awareness. By creating a course and persona that is welcoming, you show that you care about your learners by being approachable, supportive, and willing to listen to concerns and feedback.  (See the image below for more examples of each.) This type of attitude toward teaching is likely more important during a pandemic, where students will look to you for reassurance and some sense of "normalcy," and yet it is important to also be honest about the challenges of our world at this time.  

Source (modified from the original):  How to Humanize Your Online Class by Michelle Pacansky-Brock and T&L Innovations. https://brocansky.com/2015/04/infographic-how-to-humanize-your-online-class.html Links to an external site.

Instructor Presence in Canvas Discussions

Some instructors think that Canvas discussions are intended to be student-only spaces for conversation.  This couldn't be less true!  Your students want to hear from you, and will be reassured that they are not only learning but are heading in the right direction if you participate in online discussions with your students.

Now, participating does not mean replying to every student.  This approach would not only be crushingly time consuming, but the perception on the student may be that you are dominating the conversation.  If you don't intentionally reply verbally to every student for a discussion prompt in class, then you don't need to reply to everyone in a Canvas discussion.

That said, be strategic about how you respond to students. Consider some of the roles you might play in a F2F discussion.  These roles can all be adapted to Canvas discussions:

• Facilitator: guiding conversation; making sure that everyone has a voice and no one is dominating the conversation
• "Devil's advocate": helping students to examine their own position/assumptions by taking up the other side
• Inquirer: asking students to elaborate or add an example/source/citation
• Cheerleader: encouraging students to keep going; highlighting exemplary responses

Finished here?

Select "Next" to go to the next page and explore strategies for communicating with and providing feedback to your students.