Reflecting on Social Presence

Those who regularly read my blog know that I am currently in a doctoral program, and I'm conducting my studies at Boise State University in the online Ed.D. program, studying Educational Technology.  Most of our work is asynchronous (we don't all login at the same time to interact), and while it is high-level, interactive, collaborative work, it is online, distance learning, which can be isolating.

But it doesn't have to be.

Since I'm studying online, I don't have the opportunity to have "hallway conversations" with my classmates as you might before or after a face-to-face class. But that doesn't mean we don't still interact outside of the discussion forums and VoiceThreads. In fact, our cohort does a really great job of keeping in touch using tools like Google Hangouts and TodaysMeet and Twitter. How much each of my classmates gets involved in these communication channels varies--not all of us have the same level of wanting to be in touch, I think--but I have personally benefitted greatly through this. I have built real friendships with people scattered across the globe.

If you've never experienced this kind of relationship-building, you might be skeptical about the level of friendship that can actually develop using only online tools. But I recently had an experience that confirmed it for me.

Cognitive Presence, Social Presence, Teaching Presence

I have taught online for the past three summers,  and this summer it has felt like a welcome respite to take courses online instead of teaching them. It is good for me to be in the student's seat, and to think about online teaching and learning from the learner's perspective. It is interesting for me to be learning about teaching in an online setting. Since I already have some first-hand knowledge--I have taught five or six courses online now--one might think I have expertise in online teaching. And I suppose I do, to a point, but the things I have learned have mostly come through trial and error so far. This course has been a fantastic way to rethink not only what I am doing as an online instructor, but why I am doing it that way.

Specifically, one of the things I have been wondering about is how to build teaching presence in an online course. Since the courses I teach have been mostly asynchronous (we rarely have meetings in which we all are logged in at the same time to share in realtime), it has been a challenge for me to try to replicate what I do in face-to-face courses.

Image by Phil Norton [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]