Building Social Presence in Online Courses

Social presence is an important topic, which must be addressed in distance education, because human beings naturally want to sense that they are needed, they play a role in something and not isolated. In a learning environment, the learners need to be aware of each other’s presence for the learning to be more productive. Social presence is something, which is sometimes overlooked by many institutions of higher learning when implementing online education in their curriculum. Deficiency of social interaction among learner in learning communities makes distance learning appear boring and unexciting for both the learner and the educator.

Here are some strategies to creating social presence in online courses.

 

Course Design:	Instructors:	Participants:
Develop welcome messages Include student profiles Incorporate audio Limit class size Structure collaborative	Contribute to discussion boards Promptly answer e-mail Provide frequent feedback Strike up a conversation Share personal stories and experiences Use humor Use emoticons Address students by name Allow students options for addressing the instructor	Contribute to discussion boards Promptly answer e-mail  Strike up a conversation Share personal stories and experiences Use humor Use emoticons Use appropriate titles

Adapted from Aragon (2003).

#onlinevoice

Want to see some of the tools other educators are using for their online courses? Then check out the hashtag keyword "#onlinevoice" on Twitter!

https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23onlinevoice

The Southern Regional Electronic Board (SREB) asked the SREB/iNACOL National Online Teacher of the Year Finalists to tweet tools and resources "that bring excellence to online learning." And others have been invited to join in as well.

So if you have found a great tool, feel free to share it with others - or just check out the twitter stream to find some new ideas for your own online classes.