One of the most important but often most neglected aspects of teaching online is being able to create a strong presence of yourself for students. Especially if students aren’t ever going to meet an instructor face to face, it’s critical for them to get a sense of who is teaching the course they’re taking. Course facilitators need to take every opportunity to inject a little bit of who they are into what they do online and especially into what they create for an online course.
Using short videos to introduce a course is common practice. Typically, this is a low quality effort, usually a faculty member sitting in front of his/her web cam flanked by bookshelves, papers, books, and other miscellaneous clutter. While it’s always nice to see someone’s face, this doesn’t communicate much to the student beyond “Yep, there’s a professor out there….somewhere. Even looks like a professor.”
But communicating who you are matters even more in the online space when your students haven’t passed you in the hallway, heard you speak at a campus event, or read about you in the campus paper. What matters is that students feel connected to you and to their classmates in some way. If you’re not communicating anything more than “garden variety professor” it will be much more difficult for them to make that connection.
Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to give students a sense of what you’re about.
If you are kind of kooky, a little “out there” or just plain fun, you can show that as this instructor at Pittsburgh Technical Institute does in the video below. Because I worked closely with her, I knew she was a very fun person who had a good rapport with her F2F students so I encouraged her to be as outlandish as she wanted to be and prodded her bit to see how zany she wanted to get. She ended up with something that really gave students a good look at her personality while also giving them something to talk about.
Even if a faculty member is particularly reserved, that doesn’t mean he or she can’t create an online video that is engaging to watch. The script doesn’t have to be particularly revealing or personal, but what is said should be unique and descriptive. People who choose to study medical coding and work in that field aren’t usually flamboyant, but this instructor in the following clip shared something very humorous with her online students that went a long way towards making them feel warmly welcomed and comfortable in her online course.
In addition to showing students a little bit of who you are, intro videos should also show students the connection you have to your work. Why are you teaching this course? What do you like about teaching it? What do you hope students get out of it? Why is it a valuable learning experience?
So next time you need to create an intro video for an online course, strive to make it personal.
To recap:
Show Yourself – Let students see a little bit of who is on the other end of the course they’re taking
Break the Ice – Tell a story, use an anecdote, put a smile on someone’s face
Be Welcoming – Everyone likes to be noticed and recognized even in cyberspace. Find ways to let students know you are there.