Communicating and Connecting - Preparing to Teach Online

Hello and welcome to Preparing to teach online. This segment is going to be about communicating and connecting with your students. After this presentation, you will be able to understand how communicating and connecting is related to online student success, describe the importance of creating presence, identify and apply different communication strategies, describe best practices for communicating and connecting. Communicate strategically and with meaning, and identify and utilize the best tool or tools for your communication and connecting. So why is communicating and connecting so important in online courses? Well, research from community college research center at Columbia University states that the CCRC researchers rated each of these 23 online courses that they observed in terms of the depth of its interpersonal interaction, as well as other quality factors such as clarity of learning objectives and effectiveness of technology integration, and used these ratings to predict student grades.

01:05 - The coarsest level of interpersonal interaction was the most important factor in predicting student grades. Students in low interaction courses earned nearly one letter grade lower than students in high interaction courses. Why is this? Because your class is an educational community. An educational community is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding. The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful, basically collaborative, constructive learning experience through the development of three independent elements, social, cognitive, and teaching presence.

01:47 - Social presence is the ability of participants to identify with the community or basically their course of study, communicate purposefully in a trusting environment and develop interpersonal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities. Teaching presence is the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes. Finally, cognitive presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse. In a recent webinar by the Association of College and University Educators, Flower Darby, who’s the Assistant Dean of Online and Innovative Pedagogies at Northern Arizona University, and she’s a frequent speaker at many of these webinars, added the surrounding circle of emotional presence to encompass all of them. Students need to know that you were there with them through this online course.

02:42 - She says it is one of the most important thing student can care about is knowing that their instructors there with them in the online environment and providing an emotional presence for your students is a lot easier than you think it is. Communicating and connecting with your students is a high impact practice. But keep in mind, you don’t want to push them too much. So ask them what they are comfortable sharing with you. You can also make it anonymous, basically through a self-report or some sort of poll.

03:11 - And it does help you as an instructor to know what challenges your students have and if they need a little more help or support, you have an idea of what’s happening with them. Flower suggests that she has four main communication strategies. The first one is transparent. Let them see the human aspect of you. The next one is empathetic. This is very important right now. Obviously anxiety might be very high. A lot of people have been through some very rough few months. We’re not quite sure where this is all going. So things are still in flux. So communicate with them that you understand and that you will work with them, reassure them.

03:47 - Authentic communication is really the key to this and make sure that you are sincere about what you’re telling them. Also be proactive, anticipating what kind of questions or concerns your students may be thinking about. What major projects or assignments do you have coming up. Maybe there might be some confusion with it. It will help cut back on the amount of emails you get if you give them information ahead of time.

04:07 - If one student has a question, respond back to the entire class because probably more than one student will have the same question. And this way you can take care of everybody at the same time and show you’re being responsive. And finally, consistent. Email at the beginning of the week, do a midweek remember reminder, however it works with your schedule and how you think it works best with your class. But make sure you’re consistent. Just don’t start off with a lot of communication at the beginning of the class and then as the semester goes on, you sort of taper off because then the students will, will sort of get the feeling that you’re not as invested in the course. So you’ve got to keep that communication consistent.

04:44 - There are many ways you can approach the four communication strategies, one-to-many and also one-to-one. Quite often this might be an email, but make sure their strategic and efficient. You don’t wanna get bogged down sending too many emails. Your students don’t want to receive too many emails, but so make sure they’re targeted and very efficient. So parking lot, water cooler, virtual cafe, maybe it’s called “got a question”. It has many names, but it’s a place for informal communication. If one student has a question, you can respond back to the entire class through this forum. Maybe other students have the same question. It does foster student to student communication. They can make connections outside of the usual coursework.

05:22 - Some may have a cultural concern to reaching out to you. Universal Design for Learning encourages other students to help other students. And then having a “getting to know you” board in your first module allow students to post photos, provide biographical information, and add more depth to their online presence. The announcement tool, Flower likes this because you can schedule announcements. They’re usually very quick, you know, beginning of the week. Welcome to the next module. Here’s what we have coming up.

05:48 - And then Kevin Gannon, the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a Professor of History at Grandview University suggests to explicitly state what our students expect from us in terms of communications. Are we going to respond back within 24 hours, 36 hours? Do you have parameters where you will not answer emails over the weekend? Put those down so the students know exactly when they can expect a response from you, so they don’t think that you’re just ignoring them. So that helps me at least clear up a lot of the confusion as far as with the communication strategy is going to be. Can we overwhelm our students with too much communication? Of course we can. So communicate how you will communicate. Create a pattern or a structure. Will you be sending announcements once a week, every other week, find some sort of balance.

06:37 - And this also is about your own responses. Set aside time to answer. Managing your email is not ignoring your email. You may want to go by the two minute rule. If it can be answered it in under two minutes, answer the email and then don’t let them pile up. Leave the longer form responses for another time when you have plenty of time to think them through. Also ask your students to help create some boundary so you understand where they’re coming from. What is there technology? Are they still at home? Are they traveling? Is there anything that they want you to know about their situation? Let them create the space so you have an awareness of what they’re dealing with on a regular basis and is always if there are any urgent issues, you do have a reporting obligation. So keep in touch with the counseling departments and connect their students any resources they need. As far as accessibility, we know, they don’t always have constant access to technology, so we need to be flexible. Could the student do the assignment on their cell phone? Ask what technology or other tools they have available.

07:39 - They, you might have to create an alternate means for them to be able to fulfill the assignment and the learning outcomes. Ask them how Also how they consume their media. Do you don’t want to have them download too many large files because that’ll start clogging up their computer and they’ll have difficulty. So make sure any video you have is, is going to be streamed. And presence does not exclusively mean synchronous classes. You could offer review sessions, mini lectures via recorded video or podcasts. A few communication examples, usually narrated lectures instead of posting text-only. The narrated slides allow for a thorough demonstration and explanation of concepts and improve the instructor’s ability to proactively address content related questions. Students reported that the narrated slides personalize the course experience for them and created a sense of connection with the instructor. Micro lectures. Maybe there’s something that you feel your students aren’t necessarily getting right away.

08:36 - You want to post a really short video to help them through this. So creating short one to three minute videos about a specific concept will help reinforce this concept from your lectures and your readings. And there’s also live chats. This is different than a fully synchronous session. You may open up a room and be available for half an hour and just allow the students if they have any specific questions they can chat with you. They can receive direct help and they can watch live problem-solving demonstrations if your setup for that.

09:04 - But keep in mind sometimes they may not be as access for the students as you may think they are. So you might want to just sprinkle those throughout and you’ll see how the first ones go and then see if it works for your class. For best practices in communicating and connecting. We have several observations to draw from. Students perceive instructors as responsive when they encourage student questions through multiple venues and reply to questions properly.

09:31 - Students also make distinctions between technology tools integrated into a course with a clear and valuable purpose. And those with no purpose don’t deploy tech just for the sake of having technology. Instructors can establish this sense of purpose by integrating the technology into regular course activities. And by explicitly telling students when and how to use a technology- based resource. And infusing audio and video through out the lectures provides multiple ways for students to engage with content and creates a stronger instructor presence.

10:04 - As I briefly mentioned before, weekly chat sessions can allow for personalized instruction and give students the opportunity to get to know their instructor. However, participation in live chats tend to be low, so instructors can establish a flexible schedule of chat sessions and possibly require students to attend at least a minimum number of them. Giving students a clear rubric and incentives for discussion board postings helps to stimulate more meaningful interaction. And if instructors do not maintain an ongoing presence on discussion boards, students may feel that their participation is a waste of time. So again, don’t start off strong and the beginning of the semester and then maybe not check.

10:44 - And as often as you do later because the students will see that and then they’ll feel that you’re pretty much also checking out of the class. So you need to make sure that you keep the communication ongoing. Students expect and appreciate detailed instructions for assignments and clear, actionable feedback in addition to numeric grades. And finally, instructors can improve their online courses and engender a sense of caring by soliciting student feedback about the course and using that feedback to enhance the course. There are many communication tools available to you.

11:17 - Announcements or an ideal tool for facilitated communication with students concerning time-sensitive material, such as reminders about upcoming due dates, changes in the syllabus, and corrections require vacations and material. They can be automated. So you do have several options about date restrictions, duration, delivery, and the availability to override student notification settings. Emails, traditional tool for most people, you can either do it to one individual student, to a small group or possibly to the whole class. The discussion board, as mentioned before, is not just for course material, but can be used for general class questions are getting to know you to start off your course. Synchronous chats, we talked about that but be conservative with these.

12:00 - Some of the more dynamic tools that we have available, flip grid I students to student communication and presence. Students can create short videos in response to a prompt question, many presentations or do weekly reflections. Voicethread is an online platform that allows you to put digital media such as images, videos, and documents at the center of an asynchronous conversation. It allows people to contribute to discussions using a keyboard microphone, webcam, telephone, or possibly an uploaded audio file that they recorded. Kaltura is our video tool, Kaltura capture does screen casting.

12:34 - So maybe you have a software program or you’re have a whiteboard app on your computer and you’d like to do some mathmatical calculations and record that possibly for one of those mini-lectures. Same thing with a Kaltura 247 00:12:48,320 –> 00:12:51,020 capture that record your webcam so you can do an introduction video to your beginning of your course. You can do those again, mini-lectures if there’s some concept your students are not necessarily understanding, you want to get some sort of information out to them. And then Flower (Flower Darby) She likes Remind.com. It’s a text tool. Students have to opt into it. And what it does is it just another form of communication? I actually wasn’t a class once and I had a professor that utilize this and she, she used it to send out information to let us know when our weekly modules we’re open if there’s any changes as far as material, general reminders, you only use it once a week.

13:24 - So it was very low key, but it was definitely a direct way to communicate with her. students. Will thank you for watching. And if you have any questions about any of the tools or any of the strategies that were presented in this, in this presentation today, please contact the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Our phone number is 8157972477. Or you can reach us via email at CITL@niu.edu or check out our web page, www.NIU.edu, forward slash, CITL forward slash. https://www.niu.edu/citl/ We have workshops, quick guides and other resources on our webpage. So feel free to peruse that and find any information that will help you with your teaching. .