Notes for Course Facilitator

Summary: 

This page defines the importance of online teaching and social presence, identifies tools for interaction, and provides instructional strategies and best practices.

Gentle reminder: Update all content highlighted in yellow to reflect your institution.

Creating Teaching and Social Presence via Online Interactions

Research shows that students work better in groups than in isolation, not just in face-to-face classrooms, but even more so in the online learning environment (Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, 2009; Henry & Meadows, 2008; Maryland Online, 2008). Sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence.

Before designing collaborative interaction activities for your online courses, explore what types of interactions will best meet your course objectives and which computer-mediated tools will best facilitate those types of interactions. Moore (1989) describes three types of interaction necessary for quality distance learning courses and programs:

Your online teaching presence primarily deals with learner-instructor and learner-content interactions where instructors provide learner supports and present content and assessments. The online social presence focuses more on learner-learner and learner-instructor interactions where your students work in groups and seek feedback from you and their peers (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). If you can create a teaching and social presence that facilitates all three types of interactions, your online course will be successful.

 


Tools for Interaction

There are various tools and technologies available both inside and outside of to help you design your online teaching and social presence. Here are some resources to help you select the appropriate tools for facilitating interactions:

  1. The Interaction Matrix (Doc) provides you with a detailed description of tools available in and how they may be used to create interactions in your online course.
  2. The following table presents examples of communication technologies. Some of these tools are not available inside <Replace - Your LMS>
    Asynchronous Synchronous (live) On Demand
    E-mail Text, audio and video chat Audio
    Wikis Instant messaging Video
    Blogs Web conferencing Animation
    E-portfolios Online office hours Immersive simulations
    Discussion forums Virtual worlds 3-dimensional modeling
    Social networking applications Interactive multimedia that responds to student behaviors
  3. The construction model for online course designs is a graphic tool designed to support brainstorming, planning, and designing course objectives, and how they work with assessments and instructional strategies that use tools in an online course.

 


Instructional Strategies & Best Practices

Henry and Meadows (2008) summarize aspects of online teaching that reportedly contribute to enhanced learning and student satisfaction. They include interaction strategies such as quick turnaround time by the instructor, frequent and engaged contact, individual feedback, great communication skills, and regular use of student names. There are a number of instructional strategies and best practices located in the next sections.

 


Teaching Online Strategies

Visit Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository to review the following faculty strategies:

 


Optional Further Reading

 


References

 

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TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.