“Thank you so much for taking the time to treat me like a person,” wrote Stephanie in an email to me. A student in one of my online courses, she had fallen behind and couldn’t see a way forward — until, that is, we talked on the phone and came up with a plan. Having taken many online courses, she wrote: “I have never had a professor willing to speak over the phone and hear exactly what I have been going through.”
Her comment is not exactly a ringing endorsement of online education, and it highlights a pervasive problem: Students in asynchronous online courses often report feeling that the instructor doesn’t treat them like a human, isn’t available to them, and doesn’t interact with them (as in, doesn’t grade assignments promptly or return emails). In fact, surveyed about their worst online courses, students said their number-one complaint was an MIA teacher. Their instructor simply wasn’t there.
Too many of us are not “there” in our asynchronous courses even though we know that instructor presence is critical to online student success. We would never think of ghosting our in-person students. In fact, if we repeatedly failed to show up in our physical classrooms, that would be noticed and dealt with. Yet we fail to show up for class all too frequently online. I think I know why.
My aim is to explore those reasons and offer some suggestions on how to find joy and meaning in online teaching. With a renewed sense of purpose firmly in place, we can come to want to be in our online classes. We can learn to enjoy engaging with our online students.
Online courses are still subpar. Despite all the talk and training during the pandemic, online courses are painful to take and painful to teach. They’re not fun; there’s no fizz — not like the kind we as faculty members thrive on in a traditional classroom. In short, we’re not in our online classes because we don’t want to be.
As a veteran online instructor who’s written about how to get better at it, I’ve come to conclude that most faculty members think that online teaching isn’t real teaching.
What many instructors think of as online teaching is more like task management, tech drudgery, and bureaucratic tedium. It’s nothing like teaching students in person. Further, within departments, teaching online is often undervalued. Many friends and colleagues have told me over the years that no one sees how much time and effort they put into teaching great online classes. I’ve had many conversations with professors who love teaching in person and openly sneer at the prospect of teaching an online course, dismissing it out of hand as unfulfilling. And higher education’s emergency pivot to remote teaching only reinforced the bias of many instructors: I knew online classes were awful, and I was right.
Sure, some faculty members love teaching online and see its value. But most don’t. I’ve heard countless faculty members say that their online classes “run themselves,” in contradiction to my advice not to treat your online course like a slow-cooker (set it and forget it). When you take that approach, your students know it, and, much like Stephanie, they feel unseen and unsupported.
I’ve fallen into absenteeism in the online environment before, so I’m not casting stones. But it’s important to acknowledge the problem, identify the cause, and begin to fix it. After all, our online students deserve our attention and support just as much as our in-person ones do.
In fact, I’d argue that effective online teaching is vital to advance equitable outcomes in higher education. I’ve learned to find joy in online teaching for the sake of those students whose only option to earn a college degree may be an asynchronous online program. Attrition rates for underrepresented students are often higher in such programs than for in-person courses. Yet asynchronous programs continue to see enrollment gains, in part, because they offer access and flexibility to students who most need them, especially those who are neurodivergent, have physical disabilities, or have been historically marginalized.
Why we don’t enjoy teaching online. Two underlying factors most contribute to the problem of the absent online instructor:
- First, a well-meaning but misguided overemphasis on course-quality rubrics — like this one and this one — has resulted in online instructors’ time and attention being directed toward the logistical and away from the good stuff (interacting with students).
- Second, the imposition of internal and external rules regarding the amount and frequency of our interactions with students has sucked the life out of teaching and learning online.
Those rubrics and rules are typically advanced, for very good reasons, by passionate instructional designers (speaking from experience since I was one for seven years) and other support professionals. I am not against either of those things, or the experts behind them, as they’re often truly committed to online student success.
What I am saying: A hyper-focus on course mechanics has caused faculty members to equate online teaching with hoop-jumping. That’s not joy-filled teaching. That’s not meaningful interactions with real people who need our support to get them over the finish line. That’s just plodding through one online class after another.
Take rubrics. Requiring online instructors to make sure that their courses meet up to 50 course-design standards — as many colleges do — is like asking faculty members to ensure that their physical classrooms are up to code. Would we ever do that? Or expect a faculty member to fix the electrical wiring or audio/visual equipment that’s broken or missing? No. Yet many college instructors have formed a visceral dislike of online teaching precisely because they’ve come to associate it with tasks that squeeze the joy out of the work.
The other reason many of us think online teaching feels tedious is related to the imposition of online “interaction” metrics. I’m thinking of institutional policies as well as the U.S. Department of Education’s regulations to enforce “regular and substantive interaction” (RSI) in distance-education classes. The U.S. regulations are designed to ensure that institutions provide a high-quality online experience, and if not, to jeopardize their access to federal aid.
I don’t know about you, but when I think about meaningful teaching, I don’t think about complying with regulations. But the fact that the federal government has tied colleges’ financial-aid eligibility to whether online teachers are interacting enough with students is a red flag. As in, we aren’t.
I’ve seen other indications that colleges are using sticks (rather than carrots) to “motivate” online instructors to be present with their students. Some institutions monitor how many posts an instructor makes on class discussion boards or how much time they spend logged in to the course webpage on the college’s learning-management system.
An online instructor teaching at two different institutions emailed me a while back to ask about policies each had recently enacted, requiring instructors to write a certain number of weekly discussion posts and spend a certain amount of time logged in to class. He was understandably frustrated by the bean counting. Knowing that he was being monitored and tracked did not motivate joyful teaching. Just the opposite, in fact.
What do all these rules and requirements point to? Why is the number-one complaint from online students is that their professor isn’t there? Apparently, institutions and agencies are resorting to extrinsic motivators because faculty members are not experiencing intrinsic motivation to go to class. We’re not fulfilled by clicking and typing our way through a semester. The phenomenon of the absent online instructor can be tied directly to our lack of joy in online teaching.
This can be fixed. I still prefer teaching in person, but I’ve come to enjoy my online courses because I’ve discovered a higher purpose in the work. Online students have a right to a teacher who shows up to class, connects with them as people, interacts with them in online discussions, trusts them, provides meaningful feedback on assessments, and is generally there to help. Here are some ways to overcome your own sense of online teaching ennui:
- Help students to see you as a real person. Consider revealing a bit more about yourself than you now do. For example, I still see many asynchronous courses that don’t have a photo of the instructor. How are students supposed to feel like you’re a human being, there to help, if they’ve never seen you? A headshot is ideal, but even a distant shot (say, of you on a mountain bike) is helpful. If you don’t want to show your face, at least post an image that shows something about you, such as a pet or a favorite landscape.
- Record short videos for mini-lectures, announcements, and clarifications. Such videos personalize your course, and are especially important when online students are confused about a concept or an assignment. I still talk with many instructors who avoid this teaching technique because they are nervous about recording themselves. Don’t worry about your videos looking polished and professional. Just be yourself, as you are when teaching in person. In this age of generative AI, your online students want you — messy, imperfect, and human. The best way to be real with them is through informal, authentic videos.
- Offer optional synchronous office-hour sessions on Zoom. Announce them in advance and consider incentivizing attendance. Consider recording and posting videos of the sessions if you review class material. Worried that students won’t show up and your time will be wasted? Frame the office hours as “homework sprints” or similar, and invite students to work on whatever they need to work on with you. If there are no specific questions, use the time to get your own work done, too.
- Learn a little more about your students as real people, too. Assign activities like “Share One Photo,” in which students upload an image about themselves. Have them write a line or two about why they chose it. You will learn about their joys, passions, and even poignant realities. The first time I did this exercise, in October 2021, a student shared a photo of her grandmother on her Covid deathbed, surrounded by members of the family. “I’m going to make her proud by getting this degree,” she wrote. Making such connections with students can recharge your teaching battery like nothing else.
- Prioritize relationship-building activities with and among online students. Social presence is known to be an essential ingredient to prevent asynchronous online classes from feeling like the electronic version of a correspondence course. But you may have to build those social opportunities. Don’t grade them; just offer points for participation. For example, create a weekly discussion board for chatter unrelated to class, and get it going with prompts (“What is one movie or TV series you’re enjoying right now? Tell us what you like about it.”). Ask students to respond to one another, too. Or ask students to provide the prompts. Use media-rich, engaging tools like Padlet to create purely social Pinterest-like boards full of images, GIFs, and videos. Offering points, even just a few, helps motivate students to participate.
- Be true to your word. The most important thing you can do is to log in and show up for class. Regularly. Consistently. State your availability, grading turnaround time, and email response time in your syllabus and course welcome page. Then stick to it. There’s no better way to erode trust than to not do what you promised. When life happens, and your availability is reduced as a result, inform your students (without providing more detail than you want or need to) and, most important, tell them when you expect to resume grading, for example. A student in a condensed, four-week graduate course told me that the online instructor disappeared for the last three weeks of class. Students heard nothing from the instructor. After the course concluded, they discovered that she had been hospitalized, which was terrible — but really? No one, not even the department chair, let these students know what was happening? That’s a great way to reinforce many students’ worst impressions of online instruction. Be present and engaged, or tell your students why you won’t be available for a few days. They’ll understand and be grateful for your open communication.
All of those suggestions center around enhancing connections and relationships in asynchronous online classes. If you feel like you are languishing in your online teaching, the best way out of it is to plan for more interactions with and among your students. Set appropriate boundaries on your time — you won’t flourish, either, if you make yourself available 24/7. But the time you do give to this will pay off abundantly for both your online students and your own job satisfaction.
