How can presence play out in course design?
The joy of my job is that I get to apply my presence research, both to my teaching and to my faculty development work: taking the abstract and making it concrete.
I had been looking again at my research on the sense of presence , and specifically how it might be applied to course design and delivery for a class I am teaching. At the same time, I was developing a short seminar on presence for a faculty development event at Marylhurst University (February Faculty Roundtable on Instructor Presence). As I was re-visiting my bibliography and looking for new work to refresh it, I found a book that was new to me, Creating a Sense of Presence in Online Teaching: How to “Be There” for Distance Learners, by R. Lehman & S. Conceicao (2010). After I got over the “I could have written that” moment, I realized it will be a great resource for a deeper dive workshop in Spring term.
And, it inspired me to come up with a page, Course Design & Presence, describing a set of course design principles that are based on learning theory, as applied to collaborative learning, online learning environments, and the sense of presence.
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Vicki Suter 