The Critical Impact of Instructor Presence

One of the most important actions an online instructor can take in their online course is to demonstrate presence (Ladyshewsky 2013; Gordon 2017; Martin 2019; Ceglie and Black 2020) beyond just being known as the instructor of the course (Darby and Lang 2019). Showing up to your online class usually involves bringing one’s identities forward in some way, opening the door to further interaction and relationship-building with students as the course progresses. You may want to share something about yourself or your experience along the way to humanize yourself in the instructor role and connect with your students, even though there is no one right path to doing so, for the reasons we will discuss later in this chapter. Instructor presence is generally demonstrated first through a self-introduction and welcome message; then, it is reinforced by being active on the course site in ways that are fully visible to students, such as by posting announcements, engaging with students through various communication tools, participating in activities like discussions, and providing timely and helpful feedback to students on their progress. Presence communicates your engagement but also does the real work of teaching in an online course because an instructor is needed to facilitate and guide students’ learning experiences. Recall from chapter 1 the important role that socioconstructivist theory and the Community of Inquiry theory scope out for the instructor—that the instructor role is key to facilitating social interactions and learning that is constructed within the community of the course.

In annual student surveys of OSU Ecampus students, we ask about their best online course experiences and what instructors were doing that made the course stand out. The following are comments that we have received on these surveys, demonstrating common themes among our students’ responses:

• “Their enthusiasm for the subject, how much they engaged with the students, and how it felt like they really cared about us and our well-being.”
• “[The instructor] provided feedback in discussion board assignments and always replied to emails within 24 hours of receiving them. She also went above and beyond to help me when I was struggling to understand something.”
• “It was clear the instructor cared about our success in the course and they offered open help sessions/office hours for students, which anyone could watch and gain from. The sessions were also posted afterwards, so we could access them even if we were unable to make the session when scheduled.”
• “Reaching out to students early and often, creating a welcoming environment, creating good conversation with them and the students with each other.”

Sometimes, student respondents mention great lecture videos or courses that are straightforward and therefore easy to navigate; the content and usability of a course are important to the online educational experience as well. But the clear theme in these comments is that students want to interact with an instructor who genuinely cares about their progress, explicitly supports their success, and shares their passion for their subject matter. Students want to know the person who is teaching them and to feel known by their instructor as well. The instructor’s self-introduction begins to set the tone for all of the interpersonal interaction that they will have with students during the course (Darby and Lang 2019).

Reflecting on Socialization and Social Group Memberships

We always make choices about what to say when we introduce ourselves to a new person or group. Creating a self-introduction for your online class is not an exception, though the stakes are a little higher in some ways because of the critical impact that instructor presence has on student success. Sometimes online instructors post just a note about their academic credentials in the syllabus, or a brief biography somewhere in the course site, but that may not be sufficient to help students get to know you. Saying a little more about yourself can help foster a more personal teaching and learning experience, bridging the gap that arises from the lack of synchronous communication in an online course.

As you start thinking about how to best introduce yourself to your online students, it is helpful to revisit the concept of socialization—how we get to be who we are in our fullest understanding of ourselves as individuals, and how we tell that story to others.^[1] (This practice is central to antiracist pedagogy, as discussed in chap. 1, and offers an opportunity to continually self-reflect on one’s positionality in the classroom.) According to Harro (2018), as part of the “the cycle of socialization,” “we are each born into a specific set of social identities . . . [and] we’re then socialized by powerful sources in our worlds to play the roles prescribed by an inequitable social system” (27). These social identities can be thought of as social group memberships to which we each belong. There are many, though some will feel more important to your sense of self than others. Figure 3.1 lists some of these memberships.

Some group memberships may be easier to share or talk about than others. For example, it might feel comfortable to introduce yourself to someone at a local sporting event as an academic if that membership feels central to your identity or if the local college is an important center of activity in your area. Similarly, you might share with students that you speak multiple languages to help highlight that you are interested in other cultures and that you value a culturally diverse student group.

Other group memberships are more complex to discuss or may not seem appropriate to disclose to online students. That may well be the case—students need not be told personal information, for example, your marital status. Consider, though, that relationships with online students can be strengthened by offering information about more of your social group memberships for the purpose of calling out possible connections. For instance:

• Disclosing that you are a parent may make you feel more approachable to a student who needs to ask for an extension on an assignment because their child is ill.
• Identifying that you grew up on a farm could prompt a rural student to reach out and ask for more support.
• Noting that you went back to school in your 30s to finish your undergraduate degree while you were working a full-time job could inspire students in the same position to talk to you about how to juggle those competing demands.
• Highlighting that you love cooking might prompt a student who otherwise may not have attended your office hours to approach you and ask about your favorite source for new recipes, opening up the opportunity for additional dialogue and relationship-building.
• Discussing that you never self-identified as a writer and felt challenged by writing-intensive courses in college and graduate school could dispel the misconception that instructors find all aspects of academic work easy, thereby opening up opportunities to talk about learning strategies.

Your social group memberships will not mirror those of all of your students, so thinking about how your introduction will come across to students who are different from you is also a worthwhile exercise. Sharing more than minimal personal information still has an important purpose—it humanizes you to your students and emphasizes that we are all more than our academic pathways.

A particularly important thing to consider in framing your self-introduction is that you have full control over the information you share about yourself in an online environment. In a physical classroom, some of your social group memberships may be more visible (your age, gender, race, etc.), but you can decide to reveal or keep these identities hidden online. You might choose to share a headshot on your instructor biography page, or you might share a less revealing photo. You have more choices in whether and how to represent yourself, as do your students. One way to help you decide what to say is to think about what you want to ask of students for the purposes of getting to know each other, and then share your responses to the same prompts. If you want students to share a recent photo of themselves in the introduction discussion, be prepared to do so yourself, for example.

Considerations Related to Student Bias

Reflecting on socialization in the context of self-introduction for an online course is important because socialization is not neutral. Many social forces along the way (family, friends, other authority figures, culture, media) have taught us how to behave in relation to each of our social group memberships. Additionally, some social group memberships are ascribed with social power and access to options and opportunities, while some others are not (Harro 2018, 29). The impacts of power, privilege, and the biases students bring with them into the classroom may influence what you feel comfortable disclosing about yourself to your students, and what information you choose to withhold.

Since many institutions continue to use student course evaluations to assess teaching performance, online instructors may rightly feel there is a risk in revealing any identity or identities that may later subject them to biased, lower ratings from students (we will discuss research on this topic below). These risks are particularly relevant for fixed-term and adjunct faculty members whose continued employment at an institution may be contingent upon positive evaluation results, and we do not want to understate the weight of that decision for an online instructor who may have multiple minoritized identities. Sharing various aspects of one’s identities with students may have unknown costs and outcomes, and we acknowledge the difficulty of the decision to make some or any identities visible or to lean into the relative anonymity that an online classroom can provide.

Of course, there is nothing inherently good or bad about an instructor’s age, gender, or race when it comes to teaching, but these social group memberships may impact how students treat faculty and evaluate them. In faculty development workshops and consultations, we often hear from instructors that they make choices about what to share with students through the lens of credibility—sharing social group memberships that will shore up perceptions of credibility with their students and omitting social group memberships that might diminish their credibility. Studies have shown that student perceptions of instructor credibility are intertwined with their identity markers, including race, gender, ability, and other social categories. For example, some research has shown that students perceive instructors of color to be less competent than white instructors, and doubly so for women of color (Fan et al. 2019). A significant body of research has also uncovered pervasive bias in student evaluations of teaching across all modalities on the basis of an instructor’s gender and culture, including their spoken English fluency, as well as their perceived race and ethnicity (MacNell et al. 2015; Mitchell and Martin 2018; Fan et al. 2019; Clayson 2020; Adams et al. 2022; Heffernan 2022). Additionally, a study of first-year engineering students’ assumptions about their instructional faculty found that students’ top three expectations were that their faculty would be “old/older,” “educated/smart,” and “white male(s)” (Variawa et al. 2015). If these are students’ expectations, they may make negative assumptions about instructors who do not meet this profile.

Instructors who are white and who present that identity to their students are likely to be able to leverage the privilege associated with whiteness in US culture, an advantage often referred to as white privilege. In “My Life in the Classroom, Where Race Always Matters,” David Leonard (2014) examines how he benefits from white privilege because his students see him as a credible authority figure without question. He notes, “I am a white male, and that has everything to do with why I am comfortable in my classroom, why I am respected, and how I’m read by students and others” (para. 4). While his story references in-person teaching, we can imagine similar scenarios playing out in an online class because racial group memberships are not neutral and have real implications in classrooms of any modality (Kishimoto 2018). An instructor whose identities are affirmed by dominant culture may be immediately granted assumptions of credibility and professionalism by their students when they present a photo or video of themselves in an online course. Conversely, an instructor whose photo reveals minoritized identities may encounter skepticism from students about their readiness to lead a classroom—a consequence of socially constructed narratives about who belongs in roles of authority in education (Pace and Hemmings 2007, 5). The latter instructor may be inclined to share more or different information to shore up perceptions of credibility in ways that the former instructor did not feel was necessary—like that they graduated from a prestigious institution, information about their research, or if they have received teaching awards or other acknowledgments of high-quality teaching. Catherine Denial (2024) offers a relevant example as part of her reflections on the impact of her social group identities in the classroom, writing: “And while I was a first-gen student, born and raised working class, I hadn’t wrestled with the fact that my U.S. class status was shifting as I gained more and more education” (22).

Instructor age has emerged as another area of bias in student evaluation research, often framed in connection to the notion of instructor credibility. Grappling with whether or not to disclose one’s age—such as by posting a photo—can be difficult for instructors who are younger. Graduate students and some early-career faculty may be younger than or about the same age as the adult students that they are teaching online. One study of an online dental school course found that in lecture video content showing an instructor, students rated the teaching of a young female instructor and an older male instructor the highest of all faculty (Doubleday and Lee 2016). Other studies have attempted to disentangle the effect of instructor gender on both student perceptions of rapport and credibility, with students rating those two factors differently by instructor age and gender (Joye and Wilson 2015).

Taken alone, these manifestations of student bias might prompt an instructor with minoritized identities to limit sharing of their social group memberships. While sharing these details is a personal choice, some emerging evidence suggests that students with minoritized social group memberships are more likely to succeed when they see people who look like them in positions of power in academia (Bartlebaugh and Abraham 2021; Pedota 2024). A brief on the importance of increasing faculty diversity at institutions of higher education identifies a number of reasons why representation matters for students of color. Most importantly for online course facilitation, the authors note that seeing instructional faculty of color leading classrooms helps to challenge common assumptions about who gets to produce and share scholarly knowledge, and that students of color may be more likely to persist in school if they are taught by instructors of color (Bartlebaugh and Abraham 2021, 3-4). Other research has suggested that, more widely, students from minoritized backgrounds may benefit from building relationships with individuals at the university—instructors but also administrators and staff—who understand and share minoritized social group memberships (Museus and Neville 2012; Beasley 2021; Dingel and Punti 2023). These possibilities must be weighed against notable concerns with how this faculty work may be actualized within the labor systems of academic institutions. Instructors with minoritized identities are often disproportionately burdened with the additional teaching and service work involved in supporting students with minoritized social group memberships (Hirshfield and Joseph 2012), and institutional attempts to elevate the visible presence of minority instructors (especially at predominantly white institutions) may constitute “tokenism” (Hamilton et al. 2022). Instructors should consider whether revealing any of their minoritized social group memberships might positively impact their students within the context of their own online classroom, and the costs to doing so.

While there are no easy answers to if, when, and how instructors should share their identities with online students because these decisions are context-specific and personal, instructors can look for ways to build credibility in the online classroom and offer opportunities for meaningful connection and engagement while also guarding against possible effects of biased student judgments. In our conversations with OSU instructors, sharing one’s age has been raised as an example that may feel risky but can also help build connections with students as a course progresses: graduate student teachers have found ways to engage deeply with undergraduates because they can empathize with the ups and downs of being a student, and early-career faculty may be reaching other life milestones (raising a family, taking care of aging parents, etc.) at the same time as their adult online students. This example is a good reminder that social group memberships can be leveraged across the term to create and deepen connections with students. Faculty in our Inclusive Teaching Online workshop have found their own ways to promote positive connection by sharing about themselves, in part by considering the following three ideas.

First, introducing yourself to your students is not a one-time decision or action. Most often, instructors share some preliminary details about themselves with their online students in the form of an “about me” page in the course site, but additional information can be presented over time—in announcements or emails to the whole class, in feedback or communications to individual students, and the like—and only as it feels relevant or necessary. Think of this process like peeling an onion back, layer by layer, over the course of the term. Perhaps in one offering of a course you will share a lot about yourself with students, and then in another offering, that may not feel as necessary or as safe. But reflecting and intentionally planning what and how you share about yourself are important parts of inclusive online pedagogy. Revealing information about yourself can be a powerful opportunity to connect with students and build relationships with them. Students may feel better supported when their instructors share similar experiences or identities.

Second, setting boundaries about personal information is ok. There are many things that we never share with our students in the course of our professional work. Students may not need to know that you experience a chronic medical condition, but you could tell them that you may occasionally be away from the course for a little longer than your usual 24-hour response time and that you will send a note whenever the class should expect a delay in communications or feedback.

Third, share more of what feels comfortable. If disclosing some social group memberships, such as where you are from or your family composition, feels awkward, share other things that are comfortable. Show and tell students about your favorite travels, books or movies you enjoy, or what you are attempting to grow in your backyard garden. Pets are also a more interesting topic to students than you might think. Share a photo of you in your office, at an interesting place on campus, or with your institution’s mascot. Online students like to see their school even if they cannot be there in person.

We cover discrete and practical strategies that support inclusive online teaching in chapters 4 and 5. For now, consider the following questions to reflect on how you approach online teaching generally, and how you think about the role that you play in your classroom:

1. What aspects of your social group memberships do you already feel comfortable sharing when you introduce yourself to a new group of students? How and when do you do this, and why do you do it?
2. What aspects of your social group memberships do and do not show up in how you demonstrate instructor presence in the online classroom, from the moment you open the course through the conclusion of the course?
3. Would you feel compelled to reveal other aspects of yourself if a situation called for it, such as if a student struggling with mental health needed reassurance from someone who also struggles with mental health (if that is true for you)? What would you need to feel safe to make that move?
4. Based on any demographic information available about your students, what identity similarities and differences might arise? Are you homogenous as a group? Are you diverse as a group?

In our workshop, instructors address the questions listed above and express varying levels of comfort with revealing aspects of themselves to online students. There is no judgment about whether instructors ultimately decide to say more, less, or something different; the key is to be thoughtful about instructor presence and what you bring to the course, knowing how impactful an engaged instructor can be on student success. It is also important that you find ways to engage with your students that feel comfortable and authentic to you, and there are many ways to achieve a balance between that need and your students’ needs.

Intentionally Setting the Tone for the Course

Online classes are unique in that you have the ability to purposefully craft and refine a tone for the course, since most (if not all) of your material is posted at the beginning of the term. Students will quickly assess how comfortable they will be working with you and what challenges they need to be prepared for based on how and what you say about yourself and the course content. Think of all the signaling that you do to set the tone of your online classroom, perhaps without even realizing it. How you introduce yourself plays a key role in setting the tone, but so do other parts of the introductory materials in the course.

Words matter in the syllabus, in the first few pages of the course site that students click through, and in any early communications (emails, announcements, etc.) that you send to students; consider the tone of each, and make sure it aligns with the general message you are trying to communicate (Jaramillo Cherrez 2023). Most institutions have boilerplate language that must be included verbatim in the syllabus, but consider whether instructor-created policies use student-centered and affirmative language that warmly welcomes students, encourages them to connect with you rather than simply assuming they will come to you, and outlines strategies for their success rather than their failure.^[2] (We will talk more about growth mindset and how to emphasize your belief in students’ intellectual growth and skill development in chap. 4.) Think of the syllabus as a relational element in the course that can help communicate to students about your values and commitment to their success, as well as communicate with students about their needs and collective priorities (Denial 2024). Revisit your syllabus with a student reader in mind and consider the following three actions for improving it.

Communicate Expectations and Policies Constructively

In course introductions and syllabi especially, we are often trying to prevent problems or miscommunications from occurring based on past experiences through course policies and notes about our expectations. But that approach can have a negative effect for students who are still forming impressions of the course and of the course instructor. Do we want to be perceived as yelling about late work before students even get started in the course? Below are examples, adapted from several syllabi and course information page sources, in which the tone does not match the intended message. Then consider a revised version for comparison. (Remember that policies should ideally suit the circumstances and needs of online learners, as discussed in chap. 2.)

The Accessible Syllabus website by Anne-Marie Womack (2025) offers helpful guidance for emphasizing positive over punishing language in syllabi. It can be easy to miss this negative rhetoric in our own syllabi. Ask a trusted colleague to review yours from a student perspective and see if and where tone could be adjusted to convey the same message or policy in a more supportive way.

Reframe “Office Hours”

Office hours are a critical but underutilized form of academic support in higher education (Supiano 2023). Studies have shown that students believe the primary objective of this opportunity is to get clarification about course content (Griffin et al. 2014; Smith et al. 2017), perhaps even as a “last resort” for answers to important questions (Smith et al. 2017, 20). But there are many additional reasons why students— especially online students—may benefit from additional relationship-building that happens with instructional faculty during office hours. Students may learn more about disciplinary content than can be covered in the course, get referrals to key academic and wraparound supports, discover opportunities in and beyond the institution that fit their interests or goals, receive informal mentoring, or even get to know an instructor who could later provide a reference letter. For students in asynchronous online courses, office hours are usually the only time when they get to interact synchronously with their instructor and benefit from the immediacy of that personal communication.

Instructors across all modalities frequently lament how few students attend office hours, and this lack of participation can be more noticeable when teaching busy online students. Many students simply will not be able to attend synchronously because of scheduling constraints or time zone differences. Some students may also avoid office hours because meeting with a faculty member can be intimidating, or because they perceive their need for support to be a sign of weakness (Smith et al. 2017). Consequently, consider reframing this opportunity in your syllabus and anywhere else you mention it in your course site. OSU Ecampus instructors have creatively rebranded office hours as “Ask Me Anything” time, “Coffee Hours,” or simply “Student Hours.” These alternatives may be more appealing and less daunting, and they also help to clarify the purpose of the meeting; faculty have found that first-generation students may interpret “office hours” as time when faculty are busy and should not be bothered because they are unfamiliar with the vocabulary of higher education (Whitford 2018). Giving your office hours additional structure and meaning may also attract students to use them. Rather than simply listing the times when office hours are available or that they can be scheduled by appointment, offer a list of ways they can be useful—including but also beyond getting questions answered. Then, reiterate throughout the course that you welcome questions and engagement, and that the kind of interaction and relationship-building that is possible through office hours can offer students both short- and long-term benefits.

Consider offering maximum flexibility in the timing of your office hours. Ideally, office hours for online students are available by appointment. Working students benefit most from the opportunity to schedule a meeting with you at a mutually agreeable time, though you may need to encourage students to make use of office hours even when they are not held at a routine time. If your department requires that you set standing office hours each term, ask your students what times work best for them, and then rotate through that schedule. Alternatively, ask your department if you can offer some of your office hours at a standing date and time and some by appointment. In any case, use the opportunity of sharing even this logistical information to emphasize your availability and support for your students. They will take notice of how you frame the invitation.

Add an Inclusion Statement

We know from experience that not all students read the syllabus word for word, but consider adding a syllabus statement that expresses your commitment to creating an inclusive classroom. As one of the first course documents that students encounter, the syllabus sets the tone for your class. The syllabus can serve to foster student-instructor trust and recognize the complexity of students’ lives (Rognlie et al. 2025). Yet it is an often overlooked opportunity to communicate your specific approach to teaching and to shape the norms of the online classroom (Fuentes et al. 2020; Denial 2024). The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University (2024) recommends considering the following questions:

• What are your discipline’s conventions and assumptions? How might students with varying backgrounds respond to them?
• What role does your respect for and engagement with diversity in the classroom play in your personal teaching philosophy?
• What positive learning outcomes can come from respecting difference in the classroom? How can you highlight these?
• What do you want your students to know about your expectations regarding creating and maintaining a classroom space where differences are respected and valued?
• Is . . . [your] statement inclusive of different types of diversity, including, but not limited to: race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, religion, and disability?
• Which campus resources would you like to direct my students to for further support?
• What kind of classroom environment would your students like to see? How might you include them in the conversation about standards for classroom civility?

An inclusion statement could also be titled something else in your syllabus (a “classroom community statement,” for example) if you work at an institution or in a US state where equity and inclusion efforts are banned or politically fraught. Addressing classroom civility and goals for student interaction as well as campus resources, for example, could be labeled more plainly as such.

Your unit, college, or institution may have a required syllabus statement about inclusion in courses that you are required to add to your course syllabi. If this is the case for you, consider adding a personalized statement that complements the required one. Explain what these commitments and values look like to you personally and in the context of your particular course; students will appreciate that you contextualize it.

Placement of such a statement matters, too. We recommend putting the inclusion statement in your syllabus (ideally not at the very bottom of the document, which suggests that it is an afterthought), but it could go elsewhere in your course, too. Think about when you want students to encounter it: early, but not too early, in their navigation of the course might be best, meaning that at the top of your course homepage or in the first paragraph of your first announcement may be too forward and feel abrupt to students. Add it in a place where it feels authentic and where students will easily find it, and reference it during a first-week communication if desired to reiterate your commitment to welcome, value, and support each student.

Some syllabi reference an institutional land acknowledgment as a step toward inclusion, acknowledging the history of the land and honoring the peoples that inhabited it. If your institution has such a statement or you have a version that is your own, consider if it is a good fit for referencing or including in your syllabus. There are good reasons to do so if the statement aligns with and is purposeful for your research, teaching, or community work, or if it helps accomplish the institution’s mission and vision. The OSU President’s Commission on Indigenous Affairs (2025) has shared more detailed (draft) guidance that you may find useful.

Condensing your overarching views about student inclusion and creating a welcoming classroom community into a syllabus statement for your online course are challenging tasks. Examples of statements from OSU instructors in our workshop are provided here by permission to generate ideas, and these examples offer a range of disciplinary perspectives and personal commitments.

Following Through on Your Commitments

More important than writing the kinds of syllabus statements and introductory course information that we have addressed above is following through on efforts to foster the climate that you articulated in the syllabus. If you encourage students to reach out to you when they encounter a challenge, be prepared to hear from them about complex challenges that might require pointing them to university resources, coaching them, and/or giving them encouragement. If you say you will respond to emails within 24 hours to ensure that students can continue to make progress in the course, do that.

Consider being equitable between the flexibility you give yourself and your students, too. If you tell students you will be returning grades three days later than usual because you are traveling for a conference or have an unexpected commitment but you do not give students any flexibility on deadlines, students will notice the disparity. Remember that many online students are mid-career and midlife adults, and that offering mutual respect from the beginning of the course can go a long way in connecting with, supporting, and building rapport with your students.

If you have drafted (or redrafted) an inclusion statement while reading this chapter or are about to do so, consider it a work-in-progress. Ecampus instructors in our workshop have continued to revise and rewrite their statements because their vision and actions to promote an inclusive, welcoming online class are always evolving in ways that are important to ultimately communicate to students. In subsequent chapters, we will look at practical avenues to following through on your stated commitments too, such as surveying students during the term, engaging in outreach to students, amending course policies with equity in mind, and participating deeply in course discussions. Identifying concrete ways to actionize your thinking may help you to describe it more effectively to students at the beginning of the course.