Title: Week 1 The Online Teaching Persona: Develop and Deliver Your Persona
Course: Dev_TOPKIT_SAMPLE_COURSE_Bauer_S_67 > Section: Week 1 - Navigating the Online Environment

Overview and Objective:

Effective online teaching involves: social interaction; ongoing feedback; consistent online teaching presence; online cognitive engagement with students and emotional presence within the online class. At times these core elements are ignored, nevertheless they play a critical part in course quality. To ensure that the above mentioned elements are addressed, the instructors will need to develop their online teaching persona.  This purpose of this section will be to: (1) define the concept of online ‘teaching persona’; (2) identify scalable best practices and effective strategies that will allow for the establishment of the instructor’s online social presence; emotional presence; teaching presence; cognitive presence, and (3) provide you with a toolkit for  developing your own online teaching persona.

Defining the Online Persona

Carrol ( 2002) defines the online persona as the professional “self” put forth when you deal with (teach) students, personal style and in class presence. Parini (2005) suggests the online persona is a mask that one speaks through (Parini, 2005).Clark (2012) also states, "Online personas are the social identities that people create for themselves in online communities and on websites. Clark further suggests that  the images we present on web pages and in blog posts, tweets, comments, discussion forums, emails, etc help to establish a person’s online persona. Clark, C., 2012.

Intertwined with the online persona is the instructor's critical beliefs (Showalter, 2003). Giving consideration to your online persona will lead to; increased  motivation, effective teaching , improved cognitive engagement, enhances managerial roles, and enhance public personality (Lang, 2007 et. al.  2002).

The cumulative roles of the online teaching faculty, cognitive, affective and managerial roles become ones online teaching persona, and the public teaching personality, teaching style according to Coppola, et.al. (Coppola, Hiltz & Rotter, 2002).

Scalable Best Practices and Effective Strategies

- In this video, James Brown in the UCF Theatre Department, introduces his course and enlightens his students on the upcoming curriculum in his Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll course, runs 3:30.
- Professor Coronado teaching in Communications, has a bit of an edge here. Her background was in television where she anchored and reported from the field. She incorporated clips of her prior work to help introduce her persona in her Announcing and Performance course introduction, runs 2:24.
- Professor Warren Waren, in his Sociology of Popular Music course, used this animated video to introduce the concept of Sociology in Music, again, in his own voice. Note the use of the music and the allegiance to copyright and Fair Use standards. Noting ownership in the closing few seconds. Runs 3:00.
- Dr. Michelle Randall has some fun dealing with her course, Beginning Interdisciplinary Studies. She introduces her fast-paced persona and helps her new students learn as a part of the “cornerstone Interdisciplinary Studies course.

Persona Toolkit

The following are all online tools that may be used to develop and deliver your online teaching persona:

- Welcome e-mail
- Instructor introduction and photograph
- Discussion/brief bio/welcome
- Chat – Office hours, discussions
- Module intro or content videos
- Lecture PPT with audio or podcasts
- Video capture
- Daily/weekly announcements/Follow-up on prior assignment or assessment

Online Persona Chart

(Insert?)

Optional Activity

Let’s study this for the next few minutes.

- Are you are on Facebook or in an online community where you might share your online persona?
- And, how many of you are teaching online and have put any thought into this subject or tried to intentionally build your online persona?
- Is your online teaching persona identical to your personal persona? Should the two be separated?
- Do you currently use any of the online tools mentioned in the “Online Toolkit?”
How do you (will you) integrate technology to facilitate your online teaching persona?

Now pull it all together - your online teaching persona, teaching philosophy, and the tools, teaching methods and strategies you will be using in your online course. The following exercise(s) will ask you to synthesize and define your earlier work to begin to build your course. The questions will help to clarify your online teaching role(s) and responsibility to ensure a successful online course. This will assist you as you begin to design, develop and deliver your online course.

Determine how you might apply your current teaching philosophy and persona in your online course. Use the Online Teaching Persona Worksheet to map an outline of your plan.

Additional Recommended Resources

This brief video details 8 Lessons Learned from Teaching Online. Joanna Dunlap, Assistant Director for Teaching Effectiveness, University of Colorado-Denver and Patrick Lowenthal, Instructional Designer, Boise State University, teamed up to produce this for Educause.

References

Online Teaching Persona Reference sheet

Picciano, A. (2002). Beyond student perceptions: Issues of interaction, presence, and performance in an online course. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 6(1), July 2002, 21-40.

Rovai, A. P., & Barnum, K. T. (2003). On-Line course effectiveness: An analysis of student interactions and perceptions of learning. Journal of Distance Learning, 18(1), 57-73.

Richardson, J. C., & Swan, K. (2003). Examining social presence in online courses in relation to students' perceived learning and satisfaction. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 7(1), February 2003, 68-88.

Coppola, Hiltz & Rotter, 2002

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.