
Instructor Presence in the Online Classroom
27 Feb 2016I think instructor presence is critical to student engagement, for all the obvious reasons. I’ve occasionally had students connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, those are passive engagements. I once, in a face-to-face class, had a student post on my Facebook wall, during class.1
But part of the problem is maintaining active engagement. I sometimes worry that students who are in online classes are there to reduce the active engagement requirement. For instance, I used to do a weekly one-hour video chat, like a virtual office hours. And I set it up so you could see it live if we were online. Also, others could just click the button and join during class, if they wished. Anyway, over like 4 semesters of doing this, I only have 3 students total show up. It got frustrating, so I stopped eventually.
To an extent, the social media features inside the online classroom are self-defeating, since they are not always on, like Facebook and Twitter. But as a society, we have decided it may not be appropriate to like/friend/follow our instructors and students. It’s kind of a catch 22.
Image by Fuelrefuel / Wikimedia Commons.
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Under the circumstances, it was entirely appropriate. It was the last class before the exam and I had review material only. Precisely two students came to class. They suggested they should get extra credit. I posted on Facebook that if anyone agreed they should get extra credit, I would grant it. One of the two students hunted down the post and agreed. I gave them extra credit. ↩