The purpose of teacher presence is to produce personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile outcomes. Teacher presence has three parts: design, facilitation and direct instruction (Garrison 2007). It is highly significant for student satisfaction, perceived learning, and sense of community. Students need to know who their teacher is.

Here are some ways to achieve teacher presence online:

• audio feedback on an assignment
• a warm biography with pictures
• weekly summaries of activity
• encouragement in short videos

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Transactional Distance Case Study

In this case study, we reviewed some dialogue between students on WhatsApp negotiating a new assignment, with the following questions in mind:

1. What variables are impacting transactional distance?
2. What could be done to offset these?
3. What impact does this have on how assessments are crafted?

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Transactional distance describes the psychological and communicational distance that may arise in any instructional context. It is determined by the degree of interaction amongst learners, teachers, their institutions, and their environments.

According to the Manifesto for Teaching Online, distance is not only geographical, but also psychological, temporal, spatial, communicational, emotional, political, and social. All of these interact in online education and profoundly impact on the students’ engagement with courses and programmes, and so it is important to consider it in our teaching and learning design.

In general, as transactional distance increases, student experience, satisfaction, course engagement and completion, and educational outcomes are all reduced.

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Here are my notes on this video about Distance from the Near Future Teaching Project:

There will be more and more online education.

Online education is a great equalizer.

With artificial intelligence and you can access online resources, would you still need to go to university?

Online education is more accessible to students in rural areas who have less options.

We should be looking at how to get our degree courses available as online learning.

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We were given three case studies of students who were disengaging from an online course for different reasons, and asked for suggestions about how to respond.

Fortune cookie image: Chow-fun philosophy., via Footnotes on epicycles.. Licence: CC-BY-3.0

These were the three disengaging students: difficult work life balance, with a demanding job and caring responsibilities. Asked early on what the minimum was and seems to be only doing that. Busy, travels a lot for work, posts very briefly from his phone, leading to frustration from other students. very keen international student, posts frequently and is eager to interact but other students do not respond well to this. Personally, I feel like I have been both A and C!

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Teachers who are moving from on-campus to online teaching will have a lot of questions. Here are some examples:

Questions about Teaching Online

• How often is it necessary to be online?
• Should they have synchronous teaching sessions or rely more on asynchronous discussion boards?
• Would they need to work unsocial hours?
• How would they know if students were struggling?

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