Creating a strong teaching presence is not something that happens by chance. The presence is created by being intentional with the elements that you create in your course so that your students feel like you are right there with them, guiding them through the course. Feeling a sense of presence in your course is critical to keeping students engaged and coming back week after week to complete the tasks ahead.
In this regard, we will look at all of the ways you can help your students feel your presence in your online courses, including creating strong communication channels, clearly outlining your response policy for students, introducing any and all material that you present to students in Blackboard, providing video lessons, embedding images and videos for instructional purposes or presence enhancement, and thinking intentionally about layout and font choices when creating Blackboard pages.
To create strong communication channels, you can capitalize on the variety of communication channels offered by Blackboard to reach your students, including announcements, discussions, and synchronous communication options like Collaborate, Ultra, and Zoom. You can use announcements to post important updates and wrap up activities from the previous week while preparing students for the upcoming one. You can also include brief remarks about personal updates that may interest students to enhance your sense of presence. To increase the reach of your announcements, you can simultaneously send them as emails to your students’ MC email addresses by checking the box while posting the announcement on your Blackboard course site.
Another way to expand your instructor presence is to clearly outline your response time policy for students, which can clarify student expectations and protect you as an instructor by setting communication policies from the outset. You can address several things in your feedback policy, such as how soon students can expect a response from you via email, how often you will review discussions or other Blackboard communication tools, whether you will actively participate in those discussions or intervene only if there are issues, when students can expect to receive graded work and feedback from you, and the tools you will use to communicate with students, including announcements, emails, discussion board posts, or all three. Flexibility is also important, and you should let your students know that you are open to being flexible, and if you cannot meet a response deadline, you will update them with a new time when you will be able to return graded work or other communications.
In addition, you want to clarify the tools that you’ll be using to communicate with students. Will you be using announcements, emails, discussion board posts, or all three? Let your students know that you want to be flexible and that flexibility applies to yourself and to your students. If you know that you won’t be able to return work by your promised response time, give them an updated time when you will be able to return graded work or other communications to your students.
Introduce any and all materials that you will be presenting to the students in Blackboard. If you are using Build Content file to post files and Built Content web link to post links, stop using those features because they’re not up to standard for a digital teaching presence. Rather, use build content item to create all Blackboard Course Materials, files, links, and videos as item pages. More information about that is in both your Blackboard Essentials and your Blackboard Text Editor courses. Items are a better way to post materials for your students.
Imagine turning on a projector in class, loading a web page or a movie, and saying “watch this video” without explaining it. You would never do that in class, so don’t do that online. Every file, every handout, every link, and every video should be introduced to students, which is critical for two reasons. The first is that it obviously helps your students make sense of the material. The second reason, which is equally important, is that it creates a strong teaching presence in your course.
Create learning modules in your course to organize your course materials. Another way to create presence in your online course is to clearly organize your course materials. Once students learn how to navigate your course site on the first week, they should be able to find material in the course using the same navigation techniques that they learned in the first week. For every week, be consistent in the materials that you include in the week. Begin each week with an introduction to the material and a checklist of everything that needs to be done during the current week. Then introduce the rest of the content in a consistent manner, because the goal is for students to enter the module for the current week and find everything they need to get the work done.
Here are some elements to include in each learning module: Introduction and objectives, tell students what they will learn, and why it’s important. The introduction is to motivate and prepare students for the work ahead. Tell your students what they should be able to do by the end of the week and give clear objectives that begin with an action verb, which indicates what you’re requiring them to perform when you assess them.
Creating an assignments page is a simple way to list everything that is due for the current week. Your students will learn to use this as a checklist. Include a study guide to ensure that students know what you want them to learn from the readings and course materials. Study guides can be a set of objectives, a list of questions, or any approach that works. They need to answer your students’ question: what do I need to learn? And to direct their attention so they read with purpose as they study the course materials.
Organize all the materials that students need to complete the assignments inside the module. You want to include links to e-lectures, articles, websites, quizzes, assignment Dropbox, and so on. Everything that they need to complete the week. If you’re using Zoom or Collaborate, think about including a link to the recorded session that you created in the module. Lastly, every link and every handout should be introduced to students the same way you would with your face-to-face students.
One way to create a strong teaching presence is through the creative use of voice, orienters, and transitions. For voice, write as if you’re teaching one of your favorite classes or talking to one of your favorite students in your office. Students will hear your voice and your writing oriented. You want to introduce everything, so think of what you would say in class before distributing an article, playing a video, explaining an assignment, and so on. Write those instructions and objectives so that students know what you want them to do and why before they click a link. For transitions, think of the things you say in class to smoothly move students from one activity to the next. Similar instructions to your online site.
Where possible, use images in your course. Images have two uses in a course. The most important use is instructional, and any concepts that have images to illustrate them can obviously be included. The other use of images is decorative, for example, a page of directions. You might include an image with a student taking thoughtful notes. Both of these uses of images enhance instructor presence. In your Blackboard courses, you have learned how to embed images and videos in courses. If you need a reminder, please review the Blackboard Essentials and Blackboard Text Editor modules.
Another way to build presence in your course is through the use of video. Students appreciate videos that complement your weekly materials that you are presenting. Here are several options for lecturing or creating video material for students. One is to create video playlists to supplement the readings and information. Another way is to create your own video lectures using tools like Screencast-O-Matic, Collaborate, or Zoom. Lastly, you can teach by webinar, which allows you to hold class at the regularly scheduled time. After you record the session, you can put the link to the recording and the current module for students to review.
When you are making these videos if you’re making the video yourself, here are a few tips. First, imagine you’re lecturing to one of your favorite classes or talking to a few of your favorite students. When you do that, the animation that you have in class will come through in your video. Second, look into the camera. Looking into the camera appears as though you’re speaking directly to each student. Third, use the pause key as you are recording your videos. If you use a pause key when you lose your thought, that will allow you time to gather your thoughts.
Lastly, it’s important to think intentionally about font, layout, and style choices. All the work that you are doing creating instructor presence will be lost on your students if your font, layout, and style choices for the Blackboard pages make the pages difficult to read. If the pages are hard to read for your students, you’ve lost them. Here are some things to think about:
First, use numerous short paragraphs instead of lengthy, dense paragraphs. Second, apply a paragraph style to any bulleted or numbered list. Third, when writing instructions, state the action first in bold, then follow with the details. Fourth, use headings and subheadings that break up blocks of text.
I hope that you have enjoyed this primer on ways that you can enhance the digital teaching presence in your course.