Teaching Presence in Online Learning: Dr. Mark Kassel discusses establishing teaching presence within a Community of Inquiry in an online instructional environment.

This talk, which is a recorded interview, given by Dr. Mark Kassel talks about teacher presence in online learning. The talk is broadly divided into how to establish teacher presence in the online classroom at the beginning of class, how to approach teaching presence on a weekly basis on an ongoing course, and how to know what the right balance is between being involved in the class or overdoing it.

Dr. Kassel advices that first and foremost, each course and classroom setting should be approached with its own needs and therefore classroom teacher presence can vary. However, overall, it is mostly the case that teacher presence is highest at the start of a course, because it is essential to establish rapport and a sense of guidance and presence with learners at the beginning, and overtime, it reduces. As he states, his online presence might be at 50% at the beginning to mid-course and then dwindle to a 30%.

Dr. Mark offers some ideas on how to increase teaching presence. He starts off with the simplistic and classic — sending emails, reminders and announcements, communicating expectations and uploading audio and/or video clips. This is essential to establish that the teacher on the other side of the screen is a real, living, breathing human with a voice and a presence.

During the week, he suggests to mix ideas and get creative with how a teacher may engage with their students, from offering personal scenarios of case studies that leads to open discussions or offering a question, allowing students to really reflect and dig deep with no response, and coming back later with a summary of how the class participated so that another new discussion can start off from there.

This talk and video reminded me of my own learning through my CELTA certification course when teaching online. One of the teaching methodologies we were taught to use is to remain quiet during breakout room discussions, allowing students to work out their own problems and ideas, but to keep visiting from breakout room to breakout room on zoom during group discussions so that the students were still aware that the teacher was present as a guide.