This course has helped to understand that why social presence is important. The concept of introducing yourself in a way that can reduce the power distance between teacher and student is very important. This can make students communicate freely with the faculty member and help the instructor to understand the student which is a challenging task in online environment. As an instructor it is our duty to have our presence felt throughout the course. Another concept which has impacted my thoughts is that instructor should effectively facilitate the communication among the students so that they engage in a learning process through one another. Instructor should ensure that they engage in discussion and reply to one another.

Courses which I teach usually need up-to-date information on current affairs e.g., news related to economy while evaluating stock prices are very important. Therefore, I think discussion forum on news related to the economy can help me to retain my students and keep them engaged. Indeed, my experience from face-to-face classes suggests me that it is a very popular strategy among students as they actively participate in such discussions.

Moving forward my plans are to create a series of videos on important finance topics, may be 6 to 8 mins long and share it with my students. This task is getting mandatory due to pandemic as face-to-face classes are going online and students need videos to learn the topics. I have already started making video but at this time I am struggling with the duration of my videos as most of them are on complex topics and need detailed explanations. Another goal I have is to arrange meetup among students, especially in post Covid-19 era, where they can meet each other given they are living in the same city and have their pictures posted on the Moodle. This way even in an online environment student will feel as a part of the community and actively participate on the post of fellow students whom they have met. This second goal seems to be bit ambitious but very much possible.

Finally, there are so many questions on top of my head when it comes to teaching students in an online setting. I really want to experience that how much efforts are really needed to engage students in an online environment? Are they mostly self-motivated to study with deep learning approach? How seriously they pay attention to academic integrity? Etc. The only way to find the answers of these question is to get experience through online teaching. Also, instructors need to use the tools to ensure students are forced to perform the desired behavior. For example, students should be forces to use Top Hat if they are taking synchronous exams in an online class. It is a software which ensures that students must not open any other tab in the browser when they are taking synchronous exams.