After reading about teaching presence, I have learned that my Professor actually included all the key ingredients of teaching presence in the activity which I have mentioned in the first post (https://zraja.trubox.ca/2020/06/17/past-experience-otl301-post-1/). He first designed the learning activity, then he acted as the facilitator, ensuring every one must participate in that activity and finally he was also the subject matter expert. Therefore, all the characteristics of the teaching presence were fulfilled in that activity. My views though not changed much but now I can specifically identify that which element or characteristic of teaching presence I have advised to improve in my previous post.

My suggestion, in the first post of this course, to improve my professor’s learning activity actually related to the design element of the teaching presence. After learning about teaching presence, in future, while designing any learning activity I will ascertain to include all three elements of teaching presence. Definitely this lesson on teaching presence has broadened my horizon when it comes to effective teaching.

I remember when I was doing MBA from the Texas A & M International, I took an online course on Financial Institutions. One task which was assigned to us by the professor was to read the chapter from the book and post any question on a topic of choice on the discussion forum and then rest of the student needs to answer that question. Even though it turned out to be a lot of discussion but this approach helped students to get answers of some challenging questions. I learned a lot with this activity as students raised up many questions. Key ingredient of this exercise was manifested in the fact that students may have different perspectives about a topic and they can come up with different questions, sometimes very challenging as well. This laid the foundation for healthy debate and open discussion. Not only such discussions were insightful but also helped us to master the key concepts and to think out of box. If I will be replicating this exercise again, I will create groups and ask them to post the questions from every chapter on the forum rather assigning this task at the individual level. This way I will limit the discussion to manageable size so that as an instructor I can also effectively contribute in the discussion.

Compare to my post-1 in this course, I need to do a lot of changes in my introduction to enhance my social presence. In my last post I have simply written one line and most of the introduction I have intentionally given in my video to have more views. Now in an actual course I will enhance my social presence in following ways:
• I will talk about my background for example, education, experience, country of origin and
• I will also talk about my hobbies, games I like, any of my adventures, my achievements and future goals.

Further, there are many ways through which I can improve my social presence. In every module, I will post an announcement about the weekly course activities. I will also use informal language to reduce the power distance between me and my students. Now these ideas clearly are not mentioned in my post-1 and suggests a significant change in my thinking to increase my social presence.

Hello Colleagues,

Here is the recording of my voice with few important things about me.

https://www.loom.com/share/1196d925764d4dffbcc3d2b

Here is my picture.