“Hearing (my professor’s) voice and having him talk a bit about his experience in the videos added quite a bit of humanity to the course, and this made the process that much more enjoyable.”

Why Instructor Presence Matters

Throughout the student feedback and interviews, we heard students craving interaction with their instructors. They missed seeing you in class and you are the one that brings the content to life. Your personality comes through when you are teaching face-to-face, and there are ways to bring it out online too. One way you can add your presence to digital content in a blended or hybrid class is to record video lectures. This is an asynchronous approach, meaning students do not have to join at a specific time or place, but still have access to your lecture material.

Recorded lectures can be as simple as a webcam recording of you lecturing. You could use Canvas Studio to record your screen and enable the comment feature for students to engage with content. Nearpod is another platform for lecture, often used by the Nursing department to record voice-over narration on slides.

We'll talk about Canvas Studio and Nearpod in more detail later in this module.

Bringing Positivity & Energy to Lectures: Joe Bankard

In the video below, Joe Bankard, Philosophy, describes his approach to recording lectures that bring his personality into his online content. As you watch the video, use the comment area of the timelineto do one or more of the following:

Ask a question
Answer someone else's question
Identify something from the video you can use in your classes

NOTES: For closed captions, select CC on the video and choose English. Additional tools on the timeline allow you to adjust the volume, playback speed, and other settings. Also, our Faculty Voices interviewees are not facilitating this course. If you have specific questions about how they did something in their courses, we invite you to email those faculty directly; let us know if you need help finding their email addresses.

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Additional Clip

Joe Bankard on Engaging Students in Large vs. Small Classes