Canada MoodleMoot

As educators, we know that we must quickly establish a positive presence in the classroom or risk losing our students, by not establishing engagement, resulting in an ineffective learning environment. When we establish a positive teaching presence we are better able to engage our students in the classroom. Our teaching presence is found in our use of dialogue, gestures, verbiage, relatable experiences, and validation of student needs, ways of learning and culture. When we have a strong presence, our students demonstrate a higher level of cognitive thinking related to the concepts taught, perform better in assessments related to that content area and are better able to transfer information from the classroom to the real world. So, how do we ensure that we maintain this high level of presence in the Moodle classroom? In this session, we will explore and discuss ways to transfer our teaching presence skills to the Moodle classroom. Topics will include: Starting the course strong, understanding the needs of the online learner, communication, feedback versus meaningful feedback and identifying the differences between engagement and presence.