“designers and educators need to create places that are not only safe to
learn, but also spark some emotional interest” (Fielding 2006)

To me, the fourth topic of the course, with its focus on emotional presence (Cleveland-Innes, 2008), particularly emotional presence within the Community of Inquiry framework (Cleveland-Innes & Campbell 2012) turned out to be some of the most interesting and rewarding sessions of the course. For whatever reason, I think my initial associations with online networked learning had been expectations of the opposite of emotional presence – I vaguely expected that we would learn a great deal about how to handle different technical tools in order to facilitate more efficient learning, but hardly anything that was connected to emotions or emotional presence. I had participated in a number of good workshops on digital tools earlier, with enthusiastic, competent and emotionally present teachers. And we are all familiar with the phenomenon of social media and their increasing role in people’s lives, where the focus obviously is on emotional aspects rather than technological issues. And still these seminars on the role of emotions in learning and the importance of connecting to others (students and fellow teachers) with all your dimensions turned out to be a real eye-opener to me. I have listened to the initial webinar presentations by Marti Cleveland-Innes and Anne Whaits several times and will probably return to their publications a number of times in the future.

So why was this so important to me? To begin with, I suppose that we can all recognize the feeling when a theoretical model puts into words or pictures something that you already knew intuitively, but that you haven’t analysed consciously yet. And since we are all university teachers and have been socialized into academic thinking born of specific traditions, the role of emotional presence in your teaching and the extent to which your students show or hide emotions in class, may not be central to your planning and evaluation of academic thinking.

The three-fold model that Cleveland-Innes presented  in the padlet for this topic states that an educational setting consists of three main focus areas: teaching presence (NB not teacher’s presence, it could also be peer collaboration teaching), social presence and cognitive presence. All the areas are obviously interrelated and connected with central teaching tasks such as engagement with participants, engagement with content and engagement with goals and directions.

And so the main question posed is: Is emotional presence the 4th presence, residing next to the others? Should we be present in four dimensions in order to be good teachers? In the interactive padlet it was obvious that some of the participants of the course found it rather difficult or even impossible to separate social presence from emotional presence, which I found interesting.  And the answer given by Cleveland-Innes was that emotional presence should rather not be regarded as a separate skill or aspect, but rather the underlying prerequisite of it all. Perhaps we could regard emotional presence as the cellar or the foundation of the whole building. Without being emotionally present – and the huge challenge is to be able to convey this in an online environment – your cognitive, social and