UT Snapshot: Two Truths and a Lie
From the moment students "click" into their online French courses, Nancy Guilloteau
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Download Karen Kelton (Department of French and Italian
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When students enter her online French course, Karen greets them with an introductory overview and links to helpful resources:
She uses a short, formative assessment--a syllabus quiz--to help her students understand expectations for the course. Notice students are given two attempts on the quiz: The purpose here is to make students familiar and comfortable with course expectations and common questions and answers.
Aside from the syllabus quiz, one of the social presence strategies Karen uses immediately is the creation of an introductory video. This activity was her colleague Nancy Guilloteau’s idea, something Nancy said she found in a blog about teaching online. By asking students to introduce themselves via a video in Canvas, Nancy and Karen are helping them to get comfortable with technology while also allowing them the space to be visible and unique with their classmates and their instructor. Nancy and Karen ask them to introduce themselves using a fun ice-breaker activity, "two truths and a lie." But instead of leaving them on their own to create the video, Nancy created a screenflow video for walking students through how to upload their videos when she taught the class for the first time in the fall. In the video, Karen models the assignment herself to build rapport and expectations.
The use of Karen's model video quickly establishes instructor "virtual visibility," which fosters immediacy, or the degree of perceived physical and/or psychological closeness between people (Mehrabian, 1967). In addition, the video assignment allows students to take the first steps toward building community as they use the discussion forum to guess which statement in each person's introduction video was a truth - and which was a lie.
"How Do UT Instructors Build Connections and Community?"