This final course of the series will take you through an examination and application of teaching presence in a community of inquiry.
To begin, think about an example of an effective practice you have experienced with regard to online learning, either as a learner or a facilitator.
As a facilitator, one experience that I had with a class was in regards to checking in with them after a midterm exam. I wanted to get a sense to how the class was doing personally, as opposed to making that assessment based off of the midterm results solely. I set up a class Jamboard where students could all go into a shared whiteboard and add in their word or words to describe their current position in the course and how they are feeling at this point in the term. This class collaboration resulted in 26 students sharing with their peers, and then everyone reviewing the completed whiteboard at the end of the activity.
From what I saw, and from the feedback I received from the students, this was a very effective practice not only for myself but also for them. For me, it helped me get a truer measure of where the class was at as a whole, instead of just using the midterm results as a guide. For the students, it helped for them to see that they were not alone in how they were feeling, esp. for the ones that were struggling or continued to struggle.
Some of the key ingredients that underlie this experience in my opinion is having curiosity to ask the question, having a sense of trust to be able to share your experience, and then having some group reflection on the results.
What I would do to improve this experience in the future would be to have all of the students submit their responses privately to me as well, so that I could engage in some more meaningful one on one conversations with any students that identified themselves as needing more support overall in the course, instead of addressing the support more as a global class offering.