Course:OL Delivery:OTL301:Planning

Creating a Positive Presence in Your Virtual Classroom

This course focuses on the creation of a “Teaching Presence” with building knowledge and skills required to create a positive learning environment and bring the human touch to the virtual class while developing and evaluating strategies for efficient time management.

What is Teaching Presence?

From the Community of Inquiry website at Athabasca University, teaching presence is defined as the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educational worthwhile learning outcomes.

Intended Learning Outcomes

You will be able to

1. analyze the characteristics of ‘teaching presence’ in an effective distance learning environment;
2. critique your teaching presence in light of the characteristics of effective distance learning environments;
3. evaluate the ways that interactions occur in a distance learning environment and develop ideas to encourage high quality educative interactions;
4. devise, implement, and reflect on the effect of these strategies for efficient time management;
5. explore the use of digital tools to enhance teaching presence and promote student learning;
6. identify gaps in your current practice and establish relevant goals related to improving and enhancing your teaching presence in your courses;
7. monitor your progress towards achieving your goals resulting in an improved and enhanced teaching presence in your courses.

Course Overview

Week 1 - Welcome and Introduction

Activities

• Read course guide
• Set up blog
  • Author a post in WordPress
  • Tagging your Posts
  • Uploading Images
• Access Kumu wiki
• Read CoI article
• Post #1 - Self-Introduction

Resources

• WordPress and Wiki tutorials
• CoI article

Assessments

None

Week 2-3 - Teaching Presence

Outcome

• analyze the characteristics of ‘teaching presence’ in an effective distance learning environment

Activities

• Read Teaching Presence article
• Browse for 3-5 open courses (Saylor, OERu, Coursera, EdX...) and skim each for characteristics of teaching presence.

Resources

• Teaching Presence article

Assessments

• Post #2
  • give 3-5 examples of how teaching presence may or may not have been demonstrated in the various open courses you examined.

Week 4-5 - Interaction

Outcome

• evaluate the ways that interactions occur in a distance learning environment and develop ideas to encourage high quality educative interactions

Activities

Read

• Interaction resource

* Blog post 2 – Based on 3-5 open courses, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the various forms of interaction demonstrated in the course designs and suggest ways to improve the quality of interaction

Week 8 - Goals for Enhancing Teaching Presence

Activities

• Review and summarize 2-3 current articles on enhancing teaching presence and identify 2-3 goals relevant to your work
• Present strategies for achieving your goals...develop a plan