Increasing Online Faculty Virtual Presence in the E-Classroom by Exemplifying the Desired Behavior
Thursday, November 10, 2:25 p.m.

Information Session – Concurrent Session 9 Faculty and Professional Development & Support Jose Fierro (Florida State College, US) Sheri Litt (Florida State College, US)

Description: This interactive workshop will teach participants how two administrators motivated and encouraged remote faculty to leave behind the anonymity of the virtual classroom and project their presence into every “corner” of the classroom.

Notes:

• Increasing the social interactions of the students and the instructors is the goal.
• Social learning theory and strategy - learn by seeing and socially interact with others.
• Modeling behaviors are important.
• Increase Faculty Presence = Increase Student Performance

Motivate, Connect, Exemplify Behavior - Recognize and Reward Excellence!

• Virtual Convocation Wiki - Provide awareness, synchronous and asynchronous discussions, formal and informal exchange.  80% of faculty posted photos.
• Newsletter - Faculty bulletin provides information 3 times a year.  Highlight what faculty are doing.  Brings about awareness of possibilities.
• Faculty Handbook - Placed online so it is interactive.  There is searching, links to websites, videos, etc.
• Video Messages - These are used to increase social presence and these are good ways to convey information in a new way.  Clever backgrounds were used which created interest.  Faculty start asking... how do I do that with our students?  Here is a sample. 
  
  • Secondlife video was also used.  Rawlslyn Francis - Adjunct English Professor has posted a video to engage students using this technology. 
  • Camtasia Studio is also used for faculty to edit and create video.

Here is a screen shot from YouTube of English Professor, Rawlslyn Francis in SecondLife: