Strategies and Tips
- Place the video in the Home Page or first section of your course to create a sense
of connection from the start.
- A welcome video helps establish instructor presence. Instructor presence is tied to
greater engagement and increased communication.
Share your excitement for the course, your teaching philosophy and your role as an
instructor to let them know they can trust you in their learning journey.
- Including personal information such as your interests and family helps allows you
to be more approachable and relatable.
- Provide students with the best ways to contact you, expectations and preferences of
communication to reassure them that they are not alone and can seek support and guidance.
- Invite students to introduce themselves to take steps in building a welcoming and
engaging learning environment.
- Keep it short! Around 3-4 minutes is the max most people 18-29 years old are willing
to watch. Quality Matters recommends keeping videos below 6 minutes.
- Instructor Tip: Breakup video into three separate videos, one for introducing the instructor (5 min),
one to introduce the syllabus/assignments (6 min), and one to introduce course navigation
(3 min) (Harris and Greer, 2022).
- DIY with minimal editing is feasible, even ideal. Minimize scripting on videos where
the purpose is to introduce yourself. Consider more scripted approaches to facilitate
captioning on content focused videos.
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Research
- The student/instructor relationship is important for the success of online learners
(Underdown & Martin, 2016).
- The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model emphasizes the importance of establishing presence through online platforms (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007).
- Establishing social, teaching, and cognitive presence through implementing a CoI model of course design can improve student outcomes. (Stewart, 2018)
- In one study, students in courses with faculty-created content-rich videos report
a greater perceived connection with the instructor than in traditional face-to-face
courses (Griffiths and Graham, 2009).
- While presence can be established with the presenter on screen or not, visual cues from the presenter are helpful when
on screen (Wang et al., 2018).
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