One of the major complaints of students in online classes is the lack of personalized interaction with fellow students and professors in the online environment. There are various ways to mitigate that, and to bring in a more personalized touch to the class. Canvas makes it easy to give students personalized feedback in the Speed Grader function, including voice and video comments. You can also add in video and audio posts in discussion forums as an alternate to written posts. Last, but certainly not least for our purposes this week, you can embed video explainers for your assignments, thinking about your grading, how you want students to understand the assignment and your expectations, and acting as a bit of an anticipation of questions students may have.

Watch the video below for an explanation of why this is beneficial to students:

All of the ideas above are options for you to put into your courses. For our purposes, we are going to think about easy integrations we can use in Canvas the ultimate goal is always student success and retention. It is important to consider how this relates to student ideas of instructor presence within the online classroom. The more students feel we are with them, the more success they have, as this study points out. Notions of connectedness can also help students succeed in an online classroom, as the PDF below shows.

So, let's take all of this information, and consider some how-tos for creating the notions of presence in our online classes.

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