The semester before I participated in ONL202, my university asked all instructors to convert our classes into online teaching during the second half due to the emergency situation of COVID-19. Both instructors and students were not well prepared to cope with the sudden change and our emotional exhaustion and frustration rose significantly from this online class conversion as a result. This is not to mention that were were all panic and stressed from the pandemic in the community as well. Initially, I felt extremely frustrated because I thought I could not cope with the situation well enough and design of my online classes was simply a conversion of teaching materials from a face-to-face mode into e-content.

It was not until I joined ONL202 that I was introduced to the term “emergency remote teaching” which was simply what I did during that semester. Ideally, I could have taught my classes using blended learning or flipped classroom to maximize students’ learning better but when trying to cope with an emergency situation, it was very difficult to think of all the frameworks that would guide my effective online teaching. In this final topic of ONL202, I started to consider what I can do better in the future as I will continue integrating online teaching components in my class. The idea of developing a community of inquiry in our online class, in particular, is something I hope to build upon in the future.

To develop a community of inquiry virtually, Fiock (2020) suggests that we focus on strategies to develop cognitive, social and teaching presences. The cognitive presence involve online teaching elements that allow students to construct and confirm meanings in and through their learning process and can be most likely done through a well-designed reflection process. The teaching presence can be enhanced through a careful instructional design, facilitating discourse to reinforce student contributions, and direct instruction. Finally, the social presence involves how students and instructors present themselves as ‘real’ people online.

I have started using several techniques to enhance my social presence especially by communicating with students consistently in a personal tone but I would like to develop more cognitive and teaching presence in my future online teaching. There are two things that I have started developing to enhance my presences First, I have set it as my routine to create an introduction video to welcome students in a more personal tone and set them some expectations for the subject at the beginning of the semester. Second I try to maintain consistent strategies to provide feedback in online classes both to individual students asynchronously and to the entire synchronous class to enhance my teaching presence.

Reference

Fiock, H. (2020). Designing a community of inquiry in online courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(1), 135-153. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.3985