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Community of Inquiry Domains: Teaching Presence; Social Presence
For those discussion boards designed to be an open forum, respond to student posts at least 2-3 times per week. Look for posts asking for help every time you log into your course and respond to those immediately.
Respond personally to all your students at least once; post several times across the class discussion weekly. Consider the discussion boards like a dinner party. You would always greet your dinner guests individually as they enter your home. Then, throughout the night, you would circulate around the party, checking on each person to make sure everything is ok, joining in on conversations here and there, and always responding to any questions directly asked of you. Finally, you would say good-bye to all of your guests when it’s time to leave. (Faculty Focus, http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online- education/how-many-faculty-discussion-posts-each- week-a-simply-delicious-answer/)
Principle #3 Practices:
1. Did you ever send an email to someone and never hear back from them? Did you feel valued? Our students feel the same way when they craft a response to a Discussion prompt and no one replies.
a. TIP: In small classes, we want to strongly encourage you to respond to each initial post to encourage the dialog between peers and to encourage them to interact with other materials on the subject matter. For example, “Julie, this is a great definition of micro-financing – thank you! As I was reading it, I was thinking about developing nations and how critical this type of financing can be in building critical infrastructure and economic sustainability. Here is a video <link> on that – what are your thoughts?”
b. TIP: In larger classes, we suggest you respond to at least 30% of initial posts each week and rotate through the class roster so that in just about three weeks, each student has at least one response from you on their initial post—by the end of the course, they likely have at least two. What a great way to demonstrate you value their input!
2. Set up an alert on the Class Café and/or Question forum(s) so you can immediately reply to student posts/questions in this area. A huge time saver!
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