The Future of Education

Online instructors play principal role in designing and facilitating the learning environment. A sense of instructor presence in online courses is imperative to improve student satisfaction and retention rates. This presentation focuses on different strategies online faculty can employ to develop consistent patterns of interaction with students, offer learning materials and activities promoting higher levels of cognitive engagement, and provide students with in-depth feedback to facilitate their growth and development.

The current technology allows for synchronous real-time interaction between students and instructors in online courses. The video platforms integrated with learning management systems offer instructors the opportunity to effortlessly produce high-quality video lectures. Rapid development of 3D virtual worlds creates new possibilities for supporting immersive learning environments for knowledge acquisition and social interaction. 3D online learning environments provide not only new levels of spatial awareness, engagement, and interactivity, but also offer established online collaborative and communication tools, as whiteboards, audio, video, text, messaging, and web pages.

The pervasive nature of mobile technology poses distinct requirements on instructional design in online courses and allows immediate access to the learning material at any time and place. Online learning environments transcend the need for the real classroom, but increase demand for the innovative instructional design strategies to create a sense of instructor presence in online course environment.