Strategies for Creating Teaching Presence
The White Paper about teaching presence includes some specific approaches to creating teaching presence in online courses. This list focuses on both synchronous and asynchronous approaches. Read through the list and consider the approaches for design facilitation and direct instruction. How many of these strategies are you currently using in your online course? Which of these strategies would be appropriate/valuable for your current teaching? What is missing from this list?
Course Design
- Provide clear course learning goals.
- Share a course overview and welcome message
- Hold initial face-to-face or synchronous meeting to introduce teacher and course.
- Ensure instructions for completing course activities and using required technology are clear.
- Set expectations for student participation and activity in the course.
- Communicate assignment deadlines and give frequent reminders as deadlines approach.
- Provide engaging, relevant, and appropriate active learning opportunities.
- Design assessments that are congruent with learning goals.
- Communicate expectations for teacher participation (e.g., extent of teacher involvement in class discussions and email response times).
- Present content in a conversational rather than academic style.
Facilitation
- Begin course with a trust building conversation (e.g., introductions and icebreakers).
- Provide clear discussion participation requirements (length, content expectations, netiquette, and timeliness).
- Foster fruitful discussions through engaging/open-ended questions.
- Challenge and test student ideas (ask for justification/ rationale).
- Monitor discussion to ensure productive dialogue and shape direction as necessary.
- Model appropriate contributions.
- Focus on student creating meaning and confirming understanding.
- Encourage “thinking out loud” and openness for all ideas.
- Identify areas of agreement/ disagreement.
- Reinforce and encourage participation (draw in less active participants and temper more active posters).
- Find consensus/agreement; summarize class discussions
- Share personal meaning/ experiences.
Direct Instruction
- Offer specific ideas/share expert and scholarly knowledge.
- Help students correct misconceptions/diagnose understanding.
- Suggest new resources/ content; inject knowledge from outside resources.
- Connect ideas (analogies, related topics) and make abstract concepts concrete.
- Provide personal anecdotes and commentary on the teacher's own efforts to master material.
- Provide frequent feedback and evaluation guidance (particularly explanatory feedback—expansion of ideas/ different explanation).
- Present content in an effective and focused manner.
- Raise questions that lead to reflection and cognitive dissonance.
- Scaffold student understanding as necessary.
- Annotate/comment on assigned scholarly work to personalize and add interest.