Examples:

It's important to create opportunities for students to be present from the beginning of the course, when they're much more likely to feel isolated, apprehensive, and disconnected. In this example at the beginning of the course in an icebreaker discussion, I asked students to provide a link to one of their favorite songs in a discussion and then to reply to a peer about their song choice. The goal was to introduce students to one another and to keep the activity rather fun and stressless, so there were few constraints. Following their submissions, each week I randomly selected a couple of their songs and provided links to them throughout the introductions and wrap-up pages of each week's module. This provided a more personalized experience for students as they saw their song choices come up throughout the course content, and it helped to initiate relationships between the students themselves. When one student knows another student in class, she's more likely to feel like she belongs in the class and, therefore, to show up and be present in the class.

Starting the first week, it's important that my presence be felt in the class, too. Before I started developing my online courses, I informally surveyed other instructors' online students to ask what they liked and didn't like about online learning. One thing a number of them didn't like was the fact they never saw a picture of their online instructor. Not seeing their instructor made it more difficult for them to feel connected to the instructor, which is not helpful for building a learning community. So I knew I wanted to include my own images and video in my online courses as another way for my students to connect to me and the course.

One way I create these connections with my students is through brief video or audio files at key points of the course. In one example below, I'm introducing the new week's module and providing a very quick overview of what we'll be doing that week. In another example, I'm introducing the practice of brainstorming using a fun video that I created using Powtoon, a platform I was introduced to in the Humanizing Online Learning course. I received positive comments from my students about this video in particular, which encourages me to create similar videos going forward.

While creating opportunities to be present in the first week is important, it's just as important to continue to provide such opportunities throughout the course. One way to do this is to design activities that draw on students' individual contributions to a group project. While group activities have their drawbacks--namely, when a few group members don't participate--on the whole, I find that many students not only rise to the occasion but actually enjoy having the opportunity to work closely with one another. Group work makes the class a lot more personal because students are more dependent on each other's participation and they are more likely to feel like they're an important member of a team.

In this example, students had a choice of platforms from which to choose to create a group presentation. At the beginning of the project, a number of students expressed their expertise in creating graphics or slides, while others expressed an interest in learning a new platform. The level of collaboration demonstrated by these groups is high. This particular group presentation was created with Adobe Spark, a platform I learned about in Humanizing Online Learning.

Having students identify with a group in class is so important to their presence and success in class, I found, that I'm going to create student groups in week one of each course going forward. This replicates what often takes place in an on-campus class: students tend to remain sitting next to the students they already know or whom they got to know in the first week of class. They get to know each other's names, chat together before and after class, share notes, ask each other questions about the class, and support each other throughout the course.

Online, the way to mimic this is through groups. I keep the total number of group members small to try to replicate the smaller, more personal nature of the on-campus classroom experience that naturally arises when students sit next to each other.

Having groups from the beginning of the course also facilitates student interactions without the hesitation or fear of interacting before the entire online class. For example, some students are more likely to post a question to their group about what an assignment means than to post it to the entire class, even though I encourage everyone to use the course-wide Q & A discussion. So grouping students from the beginning makes sense in order to increase each student's presence and ease in the course.