How do I communicate clearly with my online students?

Your physical presence is an essential part of your traditional, classroom teaching. The immediacy of interactions between you and your students brings energy to your class and helps you quickly clear up students’ confusion about course concepts and policies. How can you translate the energy and interactions from the classroom to your online course? 

"Having an up-to-date communication plan in place helps me to create instructor presence, manage my time, and helps me to ensure students will be successful in the course.”

– Willow Fuchs

Your online teaching presence depends on timely communication, facilitation of online discourse, and well-focused direct instruction and significantly contributes to online students’ learning within a community of inquiry (Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 2000). Recorded lecture videos keep your students’ attention and demonstrates the effort you put into creating course materials that make course concepts easier understand (Dinmore, 2019). 

ICON supports effective communication in several ways. You can use the Inbox tool to message students regarding their coursework from within the system, and ICON will automatically send your messages to students’ email while maintaining an archive of course communications. Use the Announcements tool to post class-wide messages to summarize lessons learned, highlight outstanding student contributions, and address common misperceptions. Consider modality, timing and instructional purpose when planning your course communications.