QM: Creating Presence in Your Online Course
This winter I am working toward adding a new credential to my learning: Quality Matter's Teaching Online Certificate . This well-established and highly respected organization has put together a series of workshops that focuses on best practices of online teaching. I plan to reflect on each workshop as I complete them as a way to model metacognition. This post is 3 of 8. In this workshop I spent time thinking about how I create presence for students in my online graduate courses. We expect our students to make a commitment to engage in our courses- we need to make a commitment to them, as well, to be present even when we aren't face-to-face. The overarching theme of this workshop centers on the Community of Inquiry framework which states that effective online courses contain three types of entangled interactions: Social Presence- how students connect with the class community. Cognitive Presence- how students are able to construct and infer meaning from course content t...