In an online course you need to present yourself as a real person in the virtual setting. You also need to pay careful attention to ensure individual students are present because they can easily disengage if they don’t communicate or participate in the course.
Some strategies you can use to create instructor/social presence at the beginning of the course are:
- Ice breaker. In this activity, students introduce themselves, their academic background and their interests. Consider encouraging students to use using different media (e.g., photos, video) to help them express themselves and encourage them to open their minds and to willingly become a member of the learning community. It is also a good idea for you to introduce yourself and include photos and/or videos.
- Two Lies and a Truth. Ask participants to list three interesting things about themselves. (I own two iguanas; I once shook hands with Tom Cruise; and I love to waterski.) Two must be lies and one must be true. Other participants must vote to determine which interesting thing is the truth. The participant with the most incorrect votes wins. Alternatively participants could be put into small groups and find out through teamwork what the truths and lies are. Another alternative game is three truths and a lie.
- Miscomm-puter-unication. Ask the participants to share their most embarrassing mishap using a computer. Share your own experience, for example, replying to the wrong person in an email. This will loosen them up and cause a few to chuckle before embarking on a whole new way of thinking…using technology instead of paper and pen.
- Three words. Ask participants to write a story together. The rule is that everyone is only allowed to put up three words. They are allowed to post again if at least one other participant has put up three words. At the end of the exercise you can summarize the whole story of even read it and post it as an audio file or a video.
- Six degrees of separation. Ask each participant to find out how he/she is linked to another participant through 5 others because they have some kind of connection. The solutions needs to be posted and should look like this: me > Jeffrey > Donna > Patricia > Hans > Sherry with an explanation of the connections. In finding the answers, participants have to interact and ask a lot of questions to each other. It may easily take a week. A shorter variation of this exercise may be to ask participants to find one other person they have some kind of connection with. (a participant they did not know before).
- Same and different. Put the participants in groups – and ask participants to find something that the group has in common (eg ‘everyone has been to France’ and something that is unique to each person in the group (eg ‘plays waterpolo’, ‘speaks Greek’, ‘was born in Leeds’).