"To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself."

I selected working with Teaching Persona being worked into our faculty development program as it tied into Jason Docker's article on "The Problem with Teaching Presences..." (2016) which revealed how much has changed in our online world in the past few years and that "it is difficult for the students to sense who the online instructors are" and that students are afraid to reach out into the "dark" of online learning to get guidance. The article was written 4 years before the pandemic shut down that created a massive shift in teacher/student online engagement as forced interaction did not create sound pedagogical engagement.  Docker states that "...Because both teachers

and students experience this sense of isolation, it is a significant impediment to both online teaching and learning. This isolation can lead to increased feelings of frustration, confusion, and hopelessness when problems or questions

arise, resulting in decreased motivation to do the work of the course, potentially leading to students dropping out of the class (Sapp & Simon, 2005, p. 472)."  By training online instructors to have swift trust with students and learn alternate forms of online engagement other than rote writing in online courses. By utilizing these artifact interactions in Faculty Development for online instructors as well as artifact 3 of peer reviews, instructors can be exposed to new ways for discussions and assessments  to create synergy in teacher to student and student to student engagements. 

 I noticed were that during our annotation engagement, there was an assumption of what instructors think they are doing or what they need to be doing that could be more effective for OLI faculty. This artifact has an emphasis on the Teaching Persona and how incorporate it into an OWI course. I created a PowerPoint that I "presented" in Zoom; and, am refining it further for use in our faculty development program for this summer's delivery.  I included active learning techniques using a Padlet interaction that mirrors good teaching practice. This is based off Docker's third concept of "Transactions and a teacher's presence" which he prefaced with: I discuss the importance of students’ perception of the teacher, which is often referred to as teacher presence in online classes, and how problems with the concept of teaching presence (often explained as something a teacher is responsible for creating) can negatively affect students, increasing the distance they perceive between themselves and the teacher. Using reader response theory, transactional distance theory, and relational distance theory, I argue that the term teacher presence is problematic because teachers neither create nor control how students construct their sense of the teacher.  By creating this interaction for instructors and teaching them that they can lead the students to interaction in different ways to enhance the COI over learning, OLI becomes more organic in the online interactions. 

As an ID who trains faculty, I feel it is time to revisit how we coach faculty in their online engagement and persona so students are cognizant that faculty are an active part of the course. Yet, there needs to be a balance of the burden on the instructor having to be in the course at all times - thus why the pedagogy and ID consultations are an important part of OWI. Right now, IDL6543 has an assignment that involves setting up various Instructor Introductions (written or videos), but not anything on the persona. This assignment will allow instructors time and structure to envision how they want to portray themselves to the students and with the course contents.