Students ' Perspectives on Humanizing and Establishing Teacher Presence in an Online Course

When learning is moved to an online environment, students report that they feel isolated and alone in their learning experience. From the student’s perspective, communicating instructions and student learning may be more difficult to accomplish in an online learning environment as compared to taking a face to face class. Actually, establishing an instructional relationship between the instructors and the students in an online course is more difficult as well. Therefore, the challenge in designing and developing online courses is for faculty members to establish their teaching presence by humanizing the online classroom experience for their students. The authors use the community of inquiry model developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) to examine the attributes of teaching presence in an online course. This study then evaluates students ’ perceptions relating to the significance of producing a video for an online course that introduces the instructor to students and see if a specific introductory video will help to establish the instructor’s teaching presence for the students. The data collected from this study states that students valued the online introductory video and the students prefer the use of an introductory video because of the teacher immediacy behaviors that were perceived. The students reported that with the introductory video used in this course, they were able to establish a foundation of the teacher/student relationship early in th