The Online Teaching Persona, Philosophy and Strategies to Support Your Online Style

Teaching online is vastly different from teaching a comparable face-to-face class, even though this comparison is often made. The unique characteristics of teaching online require different approaches, tools, communication and techniques. Today's literature highlights many best practices and teaching strategies, including case studies illustrating successful examples. However, each online class offers such unique characteristics that it is difficult to produce one model illustrating all online classrooms. This presentation will guide you through the discovery and development process of your online teaching persona, and attempt to operationalize the various tools and strategies you might utilize to effectively support your individual style, while maintaining integrity with your teaching (and learning) philosophy. You will find this to be a unique, innovative faculty development approach to promote instructor presence in an online course. The session will be of particular interest to online teaching faculty, instructional designers and others with varied levels of experience. Those delivering online and face-to-face faculty development will be extremely interested in attending. The take away will be an exercise that could take up to two hours to fully develop and operationalize these factors in your online course. Those attending will be asked to volunteer their ideas to support the materials being presented and bolster online teaching presence.