Get Personal
- Making yourself real
- Making yourself available
- Setting limits
Making yourself real
One of the difficulties of an online course is that students don’t have the opportunity to feel themselves connected to each other, the course, or the instructor in the usual ways. Peers and instructor alike become faceless entities, many with no sense of personality definition. That lack of connectedness, or inability to locate a sense of identity in the other person, can create a sense of isolation for the individual student which, in turn, can cause them to drop out of the course. There are things you can do, however, to combat that, and the biggest of those is to make yourself as real to them as you possibly can.
Because you’re operating in an environment other than face-to-face, you’ll need to adjust your communications and your communication style accordingly. You’ll have to remember that communication consists of more than precise meanings. In a face/to/face environment, we create meaning not only through the words we speak, but a complicated combination of gestures, expressions, body language, and verbal nuances. Unless you’re singularly blessed to have a program that offers real-time video conferences of both teacher and student, your communication options are going to be singularly limited. You can create video messages for your students—even lectures, if you can handle the file size—and you can record sound files to accompany text messages, but the majority of your communications will probably be via the typed word. In other words, most of your interactions with your students will probably be via asynchronous means such as e-mail, bulletin or discussion boards, and synchronous communications through programs such as MOOs, AIM, ICQ, mIRC, etc.
Being able to communicate only via the written word means that you’ll have to do more than simply choose your words carefully; it means that you’ll need to consider how your students will interpret that text—that presentation of you. You’ll have to adapt your communications approach to an audience who doesn’t know you, and therefore can’t tell when you’re smiling or when your being serious, but who already perceives you as an authority figure. That latter point casts a different light on your interpreted text than were you being social with an acquaintance in a chat room. Your text—you—will be interpreted in the light of your position, and that can be either positive or negative, depending on the reader’s baggage and your own presentation.
Some people choose to use emoticons in order to negotiate the dilemma. Others increase the communication-facilitative language and expressions in their writings. Others may adopt an agreed-upon set of visual cues (or clues), such as colored text, small graphics, etc. Regardless of how you conduct such a change, it will help if your students can get a sense of the person behind the “voice” they see on their monitors.
If you hold your office hours in a virtual environment such as a MOO, creating a sense of your own personality is easy. The choices you make for room design and decoration reflect a sense of who you are, and if you craft your character description with equal care—perhaps even include a photo—you’ll be a little less faceless and much more real.
If you don’t have a blog, you may want to begin one. Use it to note small daily events, your pleasure over something a student has done, a particularly excellent performance, an academic or scholarly article or text that interested you, etc. While not all of your class will read it, you’ll find that a the majority of them will browse through now and again just to get a sense of who you are. If you already have a blog, include the URL in the signature block you use for your correspondence or post the site address in a place where they’ll see it.
If you have a student introduction assignment, don’t forget to introduce yourself. Protect your privacy to the extent you feel comfortable, but don’t be afraid to allow them to have a sense of your own background and interests.
Don’t hesitate to allow your own personality to show through in the course materials you design, in your web pages, in your comments on their work. You can do all those things while still performing in a professional manner.
Doing all of that will, admittedly, cost you a little extra time and energy, but it will make the difference in how your students respond to the course and to each other. The more real you become to your students, the more real the course will be as well.
Making yourself available
In the process of creating your online identity with your students, you’ll have to decide how much of your time you can afford to give them. We’ve discussed the logistics of this in the Time Management portion of this page, but there is another aspect you’ll need to consider, and that’s a mental one. In short, can your students contact you freely if they have a question, get stuck on an assignment, or just need reassurance that they’re not out in the weeds? It’s an old-fashioned customer service attitude that I’m advocating here. Emphasize your willingness to help, but make sure those offers aren’t from the standard “let’s do lunch one day” genre. Make them as real and genuine as you’re making yourself. Most students are content to know that you’re there if they need you, but it’s always better to have a student feel comfortable asking the question than be so intimidated by the environment and the process that he hangs back and finds himself with a failing grade on a project.
Interestingly, you’ll find that many students find their online instructors much more accessible than their face-to-face counterparts.
Setting limits
The drawback to making yourself both real and available is that you’ll also need to establish limits for both yourself and your students because, simply put, the more you succeed at those two things, the more—and more frequently—you’re going to hear from your students. The more they’ll ask, the more they’ll expect, and the more time you’re going to spend responding. Set limits that will help you control some of that. For instance, require that students read—not just skim, but read—any material you have posted about an assignment before they ask you a question about that assignment. More often than not, the answers they seek will already be there for them. Restrict yourself to your work schedule, and if need be, remind them what that schedule is. Establish the tone you deem acceptable for communications and interactions at the very beginning of the course. For instance, what do you want them to call you? Are there things they may not say to each other (e.g., “you may never call another student ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’.”) Establish up front how you’re handling assignments: what format do you accept, what will you not accept, how will you handle late materials, etc.
Much of this is common sense and, were you teaching in a physical classroom space, you’d put most of the structure in place during the first class meeting and secure it within the first week or two. But, somehow, when we convert to an online or distance environment, we forget these tenets. There is, admittedly, much that cannot be simply transferred from a face-to-face environment to the online one, but there are some critical elements which can and should be.
Online Teacher’s Guide Table of Contents:
Be Practical
Be Prepared
Get Personal
Self-Preservation
Teaching Resources
Blog Resources
MOO Resources
A Warning