Synchronous Instructor Presence with Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, Enoch Park, and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. In the summer of 2020, the Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that gathered educational researchers from around the world who were curious about the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. After all, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most online education was asynchronous. How important were all those Zoom meetings for student learning, really?  Today on the podcast, I welcome three members of that research group who are presenting their findings at the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference hosted by UPCEA, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My guests are Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, director of the Ecampus research unit at Oregon State; Enoch Park, senior instructional designer and online learning specialist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia.These three represent a group that conducted an extensive meta-analysis of the existing literature about online learning, looking for studies that examined the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. Spoiler alert: They didn’t find much! So if you’re looking for an answer to this big question about synchronous instructor presence, you won’t hear it. But we do have a great conversation about the question itself, their research methods, and what advice they have for others engaged in educational research. Episode Resources:Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/staff/bio/dellostm.htmEnoch Park, https://professional.charlotte.edu/directory/enoch-parkLidija Krebs-Lazendic, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidija-krebs-lazendic-3a4a8323/?originalSubdomain=au Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/ Support the showPodcast Links:Order The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching by Annette Vee, Marc Watkins, and Derek Bruff.Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribeSupport Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteachingFind me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.