How to establish teacher presence

Now, more than ever, communicating on a consistent basis with your students will be important. Student may be a bit anxious about taking your class online and they may have questions in general. Knowing that they have you to support them throughout the semester is vital to their success, so it's important to communicate often and authentically with your students.

One helpful guide is to ask yourself, "If I were teaching face to face, would I respond to the student?" -- probably that answer is "yes", you would respond to a student's question, assist if they were confused or provide coaching support if a concept was difficult. The same is true for your online classroom as well. And the good news is that there are a myriad of ways to stay in touch with your online students.

Within your D2L classroom, you can email students (and they can email you as well). Keep in mind that this is NOT the same as your ColumbiaState.edu email address that you access via Microsoft Outlook:

Instead, the D2L email will be accessed exclusively within the D2L platform. As with any communication with our students, it's key to check this early and often -- they will have questions (yes, even ones we may have already answered before!) and need reassurance and guidance, so it's so helpful to them to know that we're there, responding back, even if we don't have an immediate answer handy.

Even a response of "Thank you for your email. I don't know the answer to your question right now, but I'm checking on it" will let them know they're important and they're heard.

Within D2L, we will contact students using the "Classlist" tool. Let's take a closer look at this link and with the video below:

Run time 1:15

(NOTE: This video refers to the option to "instant message" students within the LMS. That option is not currently available at CoSCC.)

Announcements are a great way to share information with your students, especially since this is the first page they come to when they log into your online class. In fact, this is an area where you can offer support and encouragement, provide reminders about upcoming due dates, share a bit about yourself and establish that strong instructor presence that provides guidance and reassurance to students.

Even better, you can pre-set announcements as part of your start-of-semester prep work and set them to open at specific times in the semester. They will open and close, if you choose, automatically based on the date parameters you select.

Find out how to utilize this tool below:

And, of course, you can communicate with your student via the powerful video tools at your disposal (like Zoom and Panopto). If you're teaching a synchronous course, then you will meet with students at a pre-set day/time (as per the schedule) for lectures, to discuss concepts, ask questions to check for understanding, and provide students with the opportunity to interact via breakout rooms and polling.

If you're teaching an asynchronous course, you can leverage video tools to record short snippets (2-4 minutes) to cover one idea. The advantage is that students can view and review it more easily than a longer 1 hour lecture, plus it can be easier on their bandwidth resources. Video recordings are also a great way to share previews of new material, reviews of covered material, brief messages of encouragement and just a general "How's everyone doing?" so that everyone stays connected.