Achieving Excellent Online Lessons

Education online is probably quite different than what we expected. We sometimes have lecture hours spent just by looking at our screen. I truly discovered how hard focusing on a lesson is during the pandemic. The problem lies in the fact that in-school lessons can never be copy pasted online. So how can a lesson be suitable to online teaching? What is wrong with the traditional way? This blog post will be about some elements that can help us achieve a successful online educational experience. This experience consists of social presence, transactional presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence.

Social presence refers to togetherness and being perceived as a real person. Of course, we all are real behind the screen but imagine a lecture with no cameras on. We don’t even know if someone is behind the screen listening or in another room. In class, we always have faces and expressions we look at. In online lessons, most of the time we don’t have these. When we answer a question, we might even get the feeling that we aren’t speaking to anyone, we’re speaking to a screen. Social presence should exist for an effective online lesson. We can do activities like asking everyone to describe how they are with one word. Students should be able to feel that they’re in a class with their friends, just like they’d be in a school classroom.

Transactional presence refers to feeling connected to others. There should be a transactional presence, giving the students the feeling that they’re not alone. There should be activities connecting students like group activities in breakout rooms. Through these activities, students will be able to exchange information and create interaction.

Cognitive presence refers to students connecting together via internet to exchange information and create new ideas. During group activities in an online lesson, students will be able to work co operatively. Each one of them will introduce a new idea, and they’ll work together to discuss and process information. Cognitive presence will allow students to be present with their ideas as well as evaluating their friends’; opening the door for a good online education.

Teaching presence refers to design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes. Teachers are expected to design and facilitate effective lessons. Besides from designing tasks for the online class, they should be able to give feedback to activities, motivate students to take part. They should make sure that mentioned presences exist in the lesson.