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Concordia University
Concordia University

Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL)

Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL)

Increasing Teacher, Social and Cognitive Presence in an Online Environment

Online Presence Defining Features Recommendations
Teaching Presence
  • Plan & prepare to maximize your impact on the student learning experience
  • Facilitate online discussion
  • Provide direct instruction (academic and pedagogic leadership)
  • Record a personal video introduction
  • Send a welcome email
  • Conduct routine 5-10 minute synchronous meetings with each student
  • Record an intro video and tour of your Moodle Course
  • Model what presence is in an online course
  • Send regular email updates to remind students of upcoming due dates and provide feedback on weekly learning activities
Social Presence
  • Establish a supportive classroom community
  • Create opportunities for students to interact with each other
  • Encourage students to post pictures and profiles on Moodle
  • Create an introductory discussion forum to cultivate student-student interaction
  • Create an online class lounge or a virtual café
  • Create study group forums
  • Design weekly activities that require students to interact with each other (i.e. discussion forums, peer editing, group projects, Zoom breakout rooms, etc.)
  • Do warm-up/ ice-breaker activities the beginning of Zoom sessions
Cognitive Presence
  • Create intentional opportunities for students to complete learning tasks and activities
  • Design activities that require higher-order thinking and are sufficiently challening
  • Devise communication/exchange structure that has students build understanding between themselves
  • Build opportunities for students to think and apply the course content together
  • Start and finish your class in Zoom (e.g. provide a hook, intro, and closure activities)
  • Design discussion forums around meaningful and thought-provoking questions
  • Provide guidelines for online participation and share descriptive rubrics
  • Provide frameworks or guiding questions to help students unpack discussion questions and build analytical skills

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