Remind Your Students That You're Human

This one might seem a little silly, but it's amazing how important it can be, especially when your students are new to online learning.

I worked with a good friend and colleague a few years ago on some online courses--I'd hired her to facilitate the courses. She told me how she'd always begin her posts to the discussion boards with a weather report or a note about how she'd just finished the laundry and boy, was she tired. This initially felt to me like just so much clutter getting in the way of students connecting to the content. I wasn't against the idea of being warm and friendly, but talking about doing laundry?

My friend explained that she was trying to remind her students that she really was a human being. Not that her students might have believed otherwise, but because there were a couple of computers and potentially thousands of miles of fiber optic cable between her and each of her students, it was important to show students that the someone on the other end was a living, breathing person.

Later, I was taking an online course and discovered exactly why my friend did this. Everything posted by the instructor in that course felt as though it was either automatically generated by some piece of software or had been written well in advance and just copied and pasted at the appropriate point in the course. I'm not against online instructors using some time-saving techniques, but if everything is pre-written, I can see how easy it is for a student to begin to think that they're connected only to a machine...

So tell your students about your laundry. Or your pets. Or what the weather is like in your corner of the world today. Tell them what you did for fun over the weekend. Unless, of course, you just assigned them a lot of work that they had to spend their weekend doing--you don't want them to resent your humanness. ;-)

Of course, lots of one-on-one contact with students will help, too. But in the group discussions it's important to show how human you are. Your students will respond in-kind, to be sure.