As I look back over my career, I recognize many poignant experiences that triggered changes in my path. Teaching online is the one experience that resulted in a significant shift in my professional identity, values, and career path. When I taught my first online class (in or around 2003), I had no idea what I was doing. I knew it was not the type of experience I wanted my students to have. And, honestly, I did not know if they were learning. At the same time, I felt isolated. I had no way to understand what quality online learning was. There were no rubrics or frameworks, as there are now. I had never been a student in a good online class. There was no community on Twitter for me to learn from, as there is now. There were no blogs to follow and no podcasts to listen to.

From my interactions with faculty across the nation who teach online, I sense there are far too many of you who feel undervalued and I want to know why.

As an online instructor, what prevents you from feeling included? What do you need to feel more valued or supported?  I want to know and here is a way you can be heard.  Create a social graphic that describes one thing that prevents you from feeling valued as an online instructor. I’ve embedded an example above that I’ve created, summarizing one thing a faculty member recently shared with me. Creating this graphic took me no more than 3 minutes.

To create your graphic, you may try one of these free, fun tools:

• Adobe Spark Post (my favorite)
• Canva.com
• Ripl

When your graphic is done, please do one of the following:

• Tweet it, blog it, or post it on any other social media network (that is adjusted to allow public views) and include this hashtag: #HumanizeOL  The hashtag needs to appear in your actual  post (in other words, if you include it on the graphic, that’s awesome, but that doesn’t help us find it.).
• Or if you’d like to remain anonymous, download the image to your computer, and click this link to submit it to me. I’ll share it for you. 🙂

I will be sharing these graphics in a variety of ways — if this prompt generates activity.

Please share this post with your networks. Thank you.