This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Jarrett Azar.
Welcome to our first Wander Wednesday blog post! We are so excited to embark on this blogging journey with you all, and hope our insights are of assistance to your pedagogical developments and reflections. We are starting our first week off with insights from Jarrett Azar, a recent Muhlenberg graduate, on faculty presence in an online format.
Jarrett (’20) majored in Computer Science and Studio Art with a focus in Photography. He was part of the original DLA team in 2016 and has been a DLA throughout his time at Muhlenberg. As a DLA, he specializes in WordPress, Hypothes.is, Pressbooks, and other digital learning systems. Jarrett has worked on multiple Open Educational Resource projects on campus and was part of the Pressbooks learning community in 2019.
Without further ado, let’s hear from Jarrett!
“Positive faculty presence is important all of the time – in a pandemic or not – but it is particularly critical to cultivate when there is no (or limited) physical space to come together. Students in an online course often feel less connected to you as a professor, their peers, and to the coursework. Working to create a consistent presence in your course goes a long way in bringing those students back to the level of connection that they would feel in person. In today’s Wander Wednesday, I am going to talk about faculty presence and offer a few considerations for teaching and learning online.
Before we went online in the spring, I had lots of exposure to what faculty presence could be in online learning throughout my time at Muhlenberg. I took an online course over the summer of 2019, have been a DLA for 4 years and worked with faculty to develop online courses before this pandemic. I, like many others, got a deep dive into this topic when we all went remote in the Spring of 2020. This gave me and the other DLAs a firsthand look at what positive faculty presence in online learning looks like and how to create or diminish it.
Although there are many ways to create a positive learning environment in an online course, I am going to highlight three techniques faculty used in the spring. The first practice is to hold a weekly zoom meeting where students are free to talk about how they are feeling and share what they have been doing/working on. This not only offers the students a space to vent, but also makes them feel like the faculty member is there for them. The second practice is to be flexible. You can be flexible in many ways such as being flexible around assignment deadlines, attendance, or even holding more office hours than you would during the semester. Flexibility is important because your students do not have the same lives and learning environments at home as they do at school. Speaking from experience, I have 2 siblings under the age of 5, so the home learning environment can get fairly hectic at times and I may not be able to complete or attend things in the manner that I would usually want to or be able to at school. The third method is to create weekly breakdowns for your students. I have heard from many peers that getting a message at the beginning of the week that outlines that week’s material and assignments went a long way in helping them stay engaged and on track. This provides students with a single message that they can refer to when they feel lost, and trust me, they will feel lost at times. These are just a few methods that really help to support students and help them to feel more connected within an online class.
I also want to briefly touch on some things that could break that positive energy that you have created. Online learning is all about finding ways to break down the physical boundaries to learning, and Zoom can be a great way to connect, share, and create in short, interactive class sessions. One thing that I would recommend avoiding would be multiple synchronous Zoom sessions each week that all last over an hour. This is a particularly difficult way to digest the course content for students who are learning online. After the spring and summer, I’m sure we are all familiar with “Zoom burnout” and how hard that second or third meeting of the day can be. This is something students will certainly feel juggling multiple classes and Zoom meetings a day.
Nothing here should be taken as fact, only as advice on how you might cultivate a positive presence in your course. There will always be an element of surprise in any course, and it can be nearly impossible to meet each students’ specific needs, but the DLA team has found these few small adjustments to learning online can make all the difference.”
Jarrett Azar, ’20