On November 14th the course Humanizing Online Instruction: #HumanMOOC will begin again. I’m delighted to be working with Maha Al-Freih, Patrice Torcivia Prusko, and Matt Crosslin again on the course. This time we will be utilizing a new social learning discussion and curation tool called YellowDig and hope to gain some valuable insights into the…
Community of Inquiry
The #HumanMOOC at #eMOOCs2015
Pecha Kucha format for eMOOCs conference talk yesterday in Mons, Belgium: Slide 1: It is my pleasure to share with you the design intent and iteration of the HumanMOOC. This course developed community while exploring the Community of Inquiry. The redesign included a competency based, badges first approach leveraging social media and asynchronous video. Slide…
Excerpt from: Course iteration as a reflective process
MOOC iteration as a reflective process: HumanMOOC In 2012, xMOOCs rose from the laboratories of computer scientists who brought a machine learning approach to education. These xMOOCs or instructivist MOOCs were best know for their re-creation of the lecture as video, computer graded assessments and very little to no interaction with the professor. While technology…
I’m sorry Dave – I’m afraid I can’t do that #rhizo15
I should begin with an admission of guilt: I have only completed one MOOC that I was a learner in. Yes, I have an EDx certificate. However, the open courses that I have built and facilitated I have finished, just in a different way. While this rhizomatic learning experience is pulling me in, I have a dissertation proposal…
Triggering Events to Promote Cognitive Presence
As a part of the #HumanMOOC, Jim Groom, the director of teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington shares his story about how he has used triggering events in #DS106. We were thrilled to get to hear the story of the Summer of Oblivion. It sounded like it was fun and when instructors…
Synchronous vs Asynchronous Debate
On Sunday, March 22nd, I was joined by two brilliant ladies, Dr. Maha Bali and Dr. Peggy Semingson in a #HumanMOOC Google Hangout. We discussed the affordances and limitations of technology specifically synchronous and asynchronous communications in online courses. Dr. Semingson makes some good points about the personal attention that can be given to an…
Voice and Video tools – which one do you prefer?
This week in the #HumanMOOC the community shared their thoughts on how to enhance Instructor Presence using three different tools. They used the video recording functionality in Canvas to record an instructor introduction video and gather feedback from their peers, then we took to the web to utilize VoiceThread and FlipGrid. The VoiceThread below contains…
Dr. Phil Ice talks about the Community of Inquiry
In this interview of Dr. Phil Ice, we talk about what drew him into researching the Community of Inquiry in the first place. He explains how retention is tied back to social presence in online learning and explains how important teaching presence (or instructor presence) is at the start of a course. He discusses how important…
Instructor Presence on #HumanMOOC with @drchuck
Tonight Robin Bartoletti and I had the honor of talking with Dr. Chuck Severance. Dr. Severance shared some of his background and expertise in creating instructional videos that help establish instructor presence. He is such a delight to talk to that it was hard to keep it to 30 minutes. Some of the participants in #HumanMOOC were tweeting:…
Humanizing Online Instruction

Humanizing Online Instruction: An analysis of the literature regarding the Community of Inquiry Ice, P., Curtis, R., Phillips, P. & Wells, J. (2007). Using Asynchronous Audio Feedback to Enhance Teaching Presence and Students’ Sense of Community. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(2), 3-25. In this article, Ice et al. (2007) state student satisfaction is…