Using the three presences (teacher presence, cognitive presence, and social presence) of the community of inquiry framework as a guide to humanize the online environment, this chapter highlights strategies and tools that authentically engage graduate students to think, collaborate, and learn in a collaborative online environment. The authors discuss their journeys to teaching online from an in-person format. This chapter will give readers (faculty, instructors, and instructional designers) insight and ideas that will elevate their online teaching and improve student success through intentional engagement.
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Knowing how important context is and how much it matters in online learning, we first want to humanize ourselves by providing the reader with context around our experiences as online instructors before we discuss how we can work to situate online teaching and learning by using humanizing pedagogies. In the next few paragraphs, we will describe our path toward humanizing online instruction, share our journey towards more accessible online learning, and introduce who our learners are, typically.
We are graduate-level course professors teaching in online graduate programs. In these graduate programs, students either learn to integrate technology and become online teachers or work toward middle grades and secondary initial teaching certification. One of us (Allison) teaches in an Instructional Technology Graduate program, and the other two (Lacey and Heather) teach in a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program. Our students come to us as working adults, some transitioning to education as a second career, others wanting to advance their skills in the classrooms, some already join us with many technology skills and strategies, and some participate with little to no prior technology skills; some have never taken an online class before. However, they all come with life experience, a professional identity, and experiences that we realize may surpass us and/or our course preparation as experienced university professors.
Allison’s journey to teaching online started as an in-person high school science teacher and outdoor adventure educator, which after graduate school led to her work as an undergraduate professor at a small liberal arts university–where in-person student-professor interactions and relationships were required and essential to student success. When instruction shifted to an online format, markedly at the beginning of the pandemic, Allison shifted to online teaching for the first time. Her initial thoughts with reference to online course planning were to keep the same format and structure of her already existing in-person class. Over time, she realized that students needed additional support to what she had been offering in order to thrive in an online environment. She also needed to provide instructions on accessing and using the online course technology necessary for her students to succeed in the online course. Throughout the transition from in-person to online instruction, using what she had learned from her experiences with students from high school to undergraduate instruction, she focused on community building and promoting social contact with her students. Fast forward a few years, and she is teaching experienced teachers whom she may never physically meet how to mindfully use technology to enhance student learning in a completely online environment. This transition from in-person to online teacher education includes a newly developed mindset and personal identity shift for her students in order for them to move accessible social learning experiences and community building to an online environment.