How to Be Present in a Remote Course
When people are teaching remotely for the first time (or close to it), they are usually worried about developing and maintaining the connections with students that they see as natural to or an essential part of in-person classrooms.
Those relationships – or at least ones that contribute to student success – are possible in remote courses; in fact, they’re essential. Karen Costa, author of 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos points to a body of research which suggests that a major aspect of successful online courses can be chalked up to strong relationships with a helpful instructor. Or as she puts it, “more than content, more than course design, you are the factor of an online course that has the greatest potential to help your students succeed.”
So, because it takes some concerted effort and because it’s sometimes difficult to imagine how to build these relationships in remote courses, here are some ways to consider making your presence known. Hopefully, they’ll help to develop a strong connection between you and your students.
Guidelines
Make regular and predictable appearances in your course.
In remote courses, it’s not a good idea to set the expectation that you’re always available; that would be exhausting, unfeasible, or both. Please take care of yourself. Consider setting for yourself a schedule for when you’ll log into the course. An hour every other weekday to respond to discussion board posts? Half-an-hour everyday to make announcements and respond to emails? Every course is different, so there is no threshold, but students need to have the sense that you’re present in the course.
Communicate that availability.
Let students know when you’ll be in the course. Let them know, too, how long you expect it will take you to respond to emails; I usually say that I’ll respond within 48 hours, after that students are welcome to email me again with a gentle reminder. Determine what works for your course.
Also, let students know how long it’ll likely take you to mark assignments. We usually cover these topics informally in face-to-face classes but need to make it explicit when teaching remotely. Make certain to communicate your availability in more than one place and way, also – in your first recorded lecture, for example, and on the home page for the course is a good idea.
Convey your personality.
Whenever you’re present in your course, try to communicate your personality. We tend to show it in our in-person courses when we talk informally with students about our own interests or bring examples from our worlds (and theirs) into the classroom. It’s good to do so in remote courses too, in your announcements or emails to students. On a welcome page, maybe talk about the parts of your subject that you are challenged by and how you figured them out. If you’re recording videos to answer questions from students, talk about what you’ve been doing or give examples from your experience.
You can make yourself available in your remote course by:
- creating a welcome page and/or video to introduce yourself (Darby, 2020)
- contributing regularly to discussion boards
- holding regular office hours (though another term might work better); ask students to send in questions, and record them (Darby, 2020)
- creating a short video if a number of students are encountering the same challenge with a concept (Darby, 2020)
- sending out a regular announcement or encouraging message; about once every two weeks seems to be a good frequency (Nilson and Goodson, 2018)
- sending out an email to students who seem to be underperforming or who aren’t participating regularly (Darby, 2019)
- offering timely and meaningful feedback on assignemnts (ACUE, 2020)
Sources
Darby, Flower and James M. Lang. Small Teaching Online. Jossey-Bass, 2020.
Nilson, Linda and Ludwika Goodson. Online Teaching at Its Best. Jossey-Bass, 2018.
“ACUE’s Online Teaching Toolkit,” 2020.
Written by: Joel Baetz
Edited by: Katrina Keefer
Last Updated: September 10th, 2020