Teaching presence I see teaching presence as the glue that holds the framework together. This presence focuses on designing, facilitating, and guiding cognitive and social processes (Garrison et al., 1999). The teaching aims to help students reach the set-out learning outcomes. This, therefore, refers to my online presence as the facilitator. I will focus this section more on my online presence than the learning outcomes. I strongly believe in the power of creating and co-creating - learning together and helping each other understand. I think being authentic in your teaching online presence is vital. Although the course is asynchronous, I am very active online. I check in with students (across all modules) weekly. I share a silly random fact about something irrelevant to break the ice, and I often add something that is a real dilemma, like load-shedding or the weather or my feelings. I use this approach to create a psychologically safe container (Rudolph, 2014) for students to feel free and open to share their thoughts and experiences. I also remind them about due dates for the week and invite them to contact me if they need assistance or have questions. In my teaching, I can extensively play with my alter ego, Dr H, to create a teaching presence (Figure 3). Dr H has her virtual classroom (Figure 4), which I send via announcement. This interactive PDF contains various links, depending on what info I need to share. She even has an Instagram handle focusing on first-year students (Churcher et al., 2014) (Figure 5). The last concept I want to touch on when establishing an educator presence is innovation in our teaching approaches. I feel that how I teach and present my course is innovative, but I still strive to find new ways of presenting the material. As part of a university that prides itself in adopting 4IR technologies, it is important for me as an educator to adopt this mandate. When integrating innovative teaching into the curriculum, we must be careful not to misalign the curriculum. I will use the Simulation Technology and Modalities module (STM01AO / STM01BO) as an example of integrating an innovative teaching approach. To critique and defend the use of technology in SimulationBased Education (SBE), students first need to identify the current modalities available. As seen in Figure 7, students will enter a virtual tour that showcases and compares the modalities; they are referred to a Wiki they have already completed, and to a Google Documents they collaborated on in a previous module. The addition of independent reading on the topic as it aligns with the assessment criteria identified in the learner guide. Once these learning activities have been completed, they are required to participate in a discussion forum that allows them to defend the use of a modality they have chosen for the simulation they will design later in the course. Figure 3: Dr H – An Online Alter Ego (self-designed by the author) Figure 4: Virtual Classroom – Interactive PDF Figure 5: Dr H Instagram Example Figure 6: Excerpt taken from STM01AO / STM01BO Learner Guide – Unit 1 Figure 7: Virtual Tour Landing Page Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching Innovation Projects 2024 39
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