An online English faculty member, a Dean, and an Instructional Designer walked into a room and… [insert punchline here]. We may laugh a lot in this session, but we take very seriously the concepts of instructor presence and student engagement in online classes.

Demonstrate and emphasize the importance of social presence and how to engage online students Be able to ensure that faculty are both able and willing to create dynamic, personal, original content for their online courses Discuss the research regarding online student engagement Create and curate ideas about how to create and meaningfully use videos, podcasts, images, graphics, gifs, humor and more in online classes.

Learn about the importance of social presence, how to engage students, and how to ensure that faculty are both able and willing to create dynamic, personal, original content for their online courses. Our campus has faculty, staff and administration work together all year to plan, create, and test new ways to engage and inspire students. We will provide you with our most successful ideas, things to try to avoid and research to support our practices. (We promise to not spend much time talking about research!) Leave with ideas about how to create and meaningfully use videos, podcasts, images, graphics, gifs, humor and more in online classes. Online faculty know about the importance of instructor presence in an online course. In this session, we will build on that knowledge by discussing the importance of social presence – letting students know you’re a real person, and letting students relate to each other as real people. We will go through creative and engaging strategies for use in online classes, including webinars, podcasts, the use of videos and images, and ways to create a personal presence in an online space. Attendees will have the opportunity to see live classes that use these strategies, and also to share their own ideas for increasing instructor and social presence in online classes. Technical information, like what equipment and software you’d need to launch similar initiatives will also be provided.