How can online learning become more humanized?
by Jessica Grant

I am now in my final semester of the Graduate Diploma of Instructional Design at AU. We looked at creating an instructor presence this week and the importance of this topic in my Instructional Design in Open, Digital, and Distance Education course.
Often in online learning the connection between instructor and student can become lost and creating an instructor presence is important. It can bridge the gap and motivate students.
We learned about creating an instructor welcome video and created our own this week. The concept of this is to create a video introducing yourself and welcoming participants to an online course. The video can then be used to introduce participants to their studies at the beginning of any online materials we create.
There are many different modalities available to create instructor welcome videos. Most of my classmates used powtoon.com, but even a webcam could be used to create a real-time live video. Here is my video, I also used it in my “about me” section of my blog after creating it.