1. Overview

Type of Institution:	Open access two-year college, with three campuses and one learning center across five counties in Southwest Florida
Course Level & Title:	ENC 1101: Composition I
Course type(s) (asynchronous, synchronous, online, hybrid):	Asynchronous online; blended (meeting in-person one day and then virtual asynchronous for the other half of the week); traditional in-person
Delivery platform(s):	Canvas (LMS), Zoom, Kaltura videos (within the Canvas LMS) and YouTube (for public-facing videos curated outside of the LMS)

Relevant OLI Principles & Tenets

Principle 1: Online literacy instruction should be universally accessible and inclusive.

• All stakeholders and students should be aware of and be able to engage the unique literacy features of communicating, teaching, and learning in a primarily digital environment.

• The student-user experience should be prioritized when designing online courses, which includes mobile-friendly content, interaction affordances, and economic needs.

Principle 2: All program developers and institutional administrators should commit to supporting and implementing a regular, iterative process of professional development and course/program assessment for online literacy instruction.

• Instructors should retain reasonable control over their own content and/or techniques for conveying, teaching, and assessing their students’ writing.

Principle 3: Instructors and tutors should commit to regular, iterative processes of course and instructional material design, development, assessment, and revision to ensure that online literacy instruction and student support reflect current effective practices.

• Instructors should be familiar with online instructional delivery practices to ensure the same level and hours of instruction across all OLI settings.

Principle 4: Educators and researchers should initiate, support, and sustain online literacy instruction-related conversations and research efforts within and across institutions and disciplinary boundaries.

• Educators and researchers should share responsibility for preparing OLI courses, instructors, support programs, tutors, and students for the unique literacy skills online courses require.

• Educators and researchers should insist that various OLI delivery models (including alternative, self-paced, and experimental) comply with the principles of sound pedagogy, quality instructor/designer preparation, and appropriate oversight detailed in this document.

2. Introduction and Supporting Literature

[1] Online learning offers students a flexible and often essential pathway to academic success. As Warnock (2009) explains in the introduction to Teaching Writing Online: Why & How, "Online writing instruction works well for many students—and for some, even better than traditional onsite learning" (p. xxv). However, the success of an online course is heavily dependent on how effectively it has been constructed. Writing in "Grounding principles of OWI," Hewett (2015) relays that too often online learning environments can feel overwhelming to students, who can become disconnected both from instructors and course materials, forces that can build to hinder the success of even the most capable student (pp. 39-40). In a study of online learning in the context of community colleges, Jaggars (2019) argues that "a lack of interpersonal connection and support" is especially challenging for community college students, who are often "anxious about their academic abilities" and can fall victim to "a range of counterproductive academic strategies" (450). Critically, these disconnects can quickly extend from frustration within the writing process to a broader lack of engagement with course materials, as frustration builds and a sense of defeat asserts itself in a self-reinforcing cycle. This article will explore precisely how brief, engaging videos can restore the instructor's presence to all aspects of an online class (from the most important assignment guidelines to the smallest note above a mid-week announcement or minor suggested resource). Such videos represent a “small teaching” solution that can help prevent students from slipping into cycles of disengagement by fostering a connected and empowered learning environment.

[2] As an open-access, two-year college with a broad footprint across five counties, online learning is a central emphasis at Florida SouthWestern State College. FSW Online currently accounts for 44.9% of FSW’s total credit hours offered, making it a larger hub of student learning than even the college’s largest ground campus (36%) ("General statistics & demographics," 2025). Consequently, setting our online students up for success has become a core mission of the institution. In a 2023 survey of the college’s online students, creating a sense of belonging and connection was identified as a key need, with less than half of surveyed students noting that they frequently felt "a sense of belonging" in online courses, and 28% reporting that they rarely experienced this sensation (see Figure 1). Feelings of connection to other students were even lower, with 46% indicating that they rarely felt connected to peers and another 33% reporting that they sometimes felt this way.

[3] One potential reason for these numbers, which appear to present a surface level contradiction between students feeling that instructors are invested in their success but maybe not as interested in them as people, could be the college’s use of "Departmental Courses" for large-enrollment classes. As outlined in the College’s Collective Negotiations Agreement (2025-28), these are classes that the college either pays faculty to develop or purchases outright from a faculty member who has developed a course independently. Such courses undergo an internal review, where they are scored according to a Quality Matters rubric, and faculty are also financially incentivized to send the course out for official Quality Matters endorsement once the institutional review has been cleared.

[4] Departmental courses were deemed a necessity for effective online teaching, especially for those who might be wading into a virtual environment for the very first time (GSOLE, 2024, Tenet 4.1). Drawing upon Garrison et al.'s Community of Inquiry framework (1999) as an analytic lens, this design choice can be understood as an effort to foreground instructor presence as a means of fostering social connection and a sense of belonging, mirroring the kind of interactions students would have in a face-to-face class as closely as possible (89). In "Hybrid and Fully Online OWI," Snart (2015) explains that such a system is important in first-year writing generally, but it is especially so in online writing courses. Here, classes can only be successful with "consciously thoughtful work on the instructor’s part" well before students enter the course shell (pp. 117-8). Departmental courses, however, are not a panacea for such issues. Hewett (2015) relates that universal course shells are a double-edged sword for instructors, particularly for contingent faculty, who may "not like being made to use predesigned or shell-based courses" but also face being overwhelmed by "the amount of work that free-form course development requires in online settings" (p. 61). FSW is in the precarious position of trying to balance these competing needs, and it was into this gap that I stepped when I was tasked by the English Department and FSW Online with leading a full redesign of our introductory Composition I course in the spring and summer of 2022, with a launch date of fall 2023.

[5] l already had four years of online teaching experience, and in that time, I encountered one consistent problem: students who were unsure of assignment guidelines or course activities because they often felt disassociated from the course and turned to assignment hunting or clicking through the class instead of reviewing and experiencing material as intended (and as they would in a face-to-face learning environment). This fact was evident in their work or directly via emailed questions. Often, I could redirect students to solutions by remediating and resharing already-available information via office hours discussions, as comments on assignments (with revise and resubmit requests), or in my email responses. By this point, though, students had lost valuable time in the class, and if they had completed the assignment without checking, they risked falling far behind their peers. Adhering to best practices as outlined by Hewett (2015), who notes the importance of "build[ing] informational redundancy into a Web-based, LMS format" (70), I presented information in a myriad of forms (e.g., via written instructions, grading rubrics, short infographics, brief presentation video lectures, various points throughout each module, etc.) (p. 70). This approach was necessary because students often skip around content in online courses, even if they are required to progress through pages in a chronological fashion.

[6] Faculty members should not flatter themselves into believing that their own learning habits are outside of becoming enmeshed in this same pattern of isolation and content disengagement. As Warnock (2009) notes when justifying the structure of Teaching Writing Online, faculty navigate instructional materials and research in a similar fashion, even when resources take traditional forms: "Much like the needed redundancy in teaching online, this repetition helps to strengthen the message in the book, because I can’t be sure where you are going to start and which path you will follow" (xxvi). This theory has borne out in my experience. My first foray into course design was spearheading the FSW's Zoom training course in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when teaching with Zoom was, for many, an intimidatingly new prospect. In this context as well, a number of participants did not read activity guidelines or requirements before attempting to complete work. This should not be seen as an individual failing, but a consequence of what Cicchino and Hicks (2024) identify as the increased "literacy loads" students face in online learning environments: "because so much of the interpersonal communication that happens in in-person, real-time learning occurs online through course announcements, emails, discussion boards, and other written formats, students need to spend much more time reading" (pp. 12-13). Building on the work of Griffin and Minter (2013), they note that such increased reading loads are a key element of the often-higher student attrition in online courses. This in turn can place "even more onus onto overworked educators" (p. 13), a fact that was made especially clear by the amount of time it took to remediate and send already present information to students and faculty training participants.

[7] Before designing the course, I stepped back and thought about what key elements might be driving the divergent experiences in my ground and online courses. It seemed to me that the higher tendency of online students to skip around for information (or pass over it entirely) was driven by the most pronounced experiential outlier of their experience in online courses, namely the lack of connection students often felt to the course or their peers. To find an answer, I turned to what Lang (2016) calls a "small teaching" solution: "small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices" that can bring "dramatic transformation to our courses" (p. 5). Lang encourages teachers to begin small and not rush to large methodological changes or new technological integrations when solutions are often much smaller and emerge from deeper reflection about the connection between teachers, students, materials, and learning goals.

[8] And, reflecting on what might be missing, I realized that the solution could be something so inconsequential that it had escaped previous consideration—or even been actively edited out of earlier course builds: replicating the small, seemingly inconsequential moments that take place before content is delivered. In class, such moments might occur at the start of a PowerPoint-guided lecture (but before the first slide is shown), at the opening of a class (but before the day’s activities get underway), or while an assignment is being passed around. The informal instructions and stories shared in these moments serve two key purposes: (1) they help students connect with me, the course material, and one another as current events and experiences from our lives seep into the conversation, and (2) they offer an invaluable—if often unappreciated—entry point into the day’s work. Small as it might seem, without such a resource, students lost a key level of access to me as an instructor, to one another as peers in a learning community, and to the course material and learning outcomes overall. I resolved to build a course that could fill this gap, not only for my own students but also at the broader departmental level through the base version of the class, which all faculty at the college receive when they opt to teach ENC 1101 online.

3. Implementation

[9] My "small teaching" solution was to personalize students’ online experience by weaving in short, informal videos to introduce resources and activities throughout each aspect of the class. The use of instructor-created videos on their own is not a revolutionary idea and has long been an essential hallmark of online course design. Writing about the effectiveness of such resources, McClure and Mahaffey (2021) explain that "through the creation of our own lecture, announcement, and feedback videos, we re-embody ourselves by including our image and voice so our students see us as human beings who want to make personal connections with them and help them succeed" (p. 111). However, my work expanded on the more formal use of videos by saturating the course with quick, one-to-two-minute contextual touchpoints that introduced material at every stage—from announcements and quizzes to readings and lecture pages (GSOLE, 2024, Tenet 4.2).

[10] I took to the extreme, too, McClure and Mahaffey’s (2021) advice to forgo concerns about perfect coherence and presentation that tend to dominate all other resources in an online class: "Students want to see who we are; they want to know that we are human. We need to stop worrying about the ‘mess’ behind us as we record ourselves or whether we are perfect or not" (p. 103). Except in unusual situations, I avoided re-recording and instead embraced the moment. If I misspoke or if some sort of environmental factor intruded on the video, whether a pet wandered in or my children could suddenly be heard arguing offscreen, the recording continued (see Figure 3). Backgrounds were not blurred, even if the home office was untidy (any working parent will know that this was the case more often than not). I wanted these videos to be spaces where students realized that messiness is part of life and part of our journey as learners, to know me beyond the "traditional" resources baked into the class—and in the process to feel comfortable being human themselves. Together, we stepped outside, talked about our pets, lamented the last drop of coffee, and generally connected just as we would in a live class setting.

[11] When I made announcements, I referenced what was happening in the world or my life in general. In one instance, I had neglected to make an announcement video the morning of a physical therapy appointment. I also forgot my mobile workstation and my change of clothes, and I didn’t have time to run home because I had to pick up my child from a summer day camp that afternoon. I logged on in my gym shirt, using a borrowed classroom computer, and shared my life (see the video in Figure 5). A student later shared that they, too, were in physical therapy and wanted to become a physical therapist because of how helpful they found that kind of care, which led to a conversation about ideas for the upcoming major research essay. These are the sorts of conversations that happened naturally in my ground course, but had long been missing in my online classes.

[12] The videos were strategically designed to help reduce the tension before students dove into an activity, read assignment guidelines, or reviewed the week’s agenda. Perhaps most importantly, I envisioned the videos as something that could empower students to skim content when it was feasible. To this end, announcements and guidelines included key reference points that I referred to in my videos and that students could revisit for additional detail if necessary (GSOLE, 2024, Tenet 1.4). As in Warnock’s (2009) guide to teaching online, it is important to be realistic about the perspectives from which learners are most likely to engage your material and structure resources with that reality in mind. The text that accompanied announcements, for example, was broken into clearly labeled sections to help students quickly locate relevant material referenced in the video and avoid feeling overwhelmed by walls of words and links at the start of their week.

[13] Small, engaging videos that foreground a professor’s personality can go a long way toward building community and relaying information that students could normally miss. This is especially true when reviewing content that they might not read because they "already know" what it covers. Here, small teaching can be at its most effective. For an example, see the Figure 5 video below, a 26-second video above an assignment guidelines dropbox reminding students to review the guidelines one last time before they submit work. This is something that I would cover in class the last day before an assignment is submitted, but students in online courses often skim over the text and jump right to turning in the project. The video’s especially short length reflects the idea that the more serious (or superficially rudimentary) the task, the more crucial it is for the video to be concise and centered on the instructor’s personality.

[14] The presence of these videos throughout the department’s model course represented a new step. While video resources have long been present in online courses, the screen is usually the focal point of videos for universal course shells (rather than the instructor) because the professor teaching a class is often not usually the same person who created it. However, I wanted this design to fully embrace Stommel’s (2018) call to humanize online education in "Online learning: A manifesto" and, in particular, his underwriting belief that "learning is not neatly divisible into discrete chunks. . . . Community and dialogue shouldn’t be an accident or by-product of a course. They should be the course. . . . The best online courses have a personality" (63). It felt essential to engage in radical honesty with students about how the class was designed and why those choices were made. At the very opening of the class, in the course overview, I explain that I created the class, provide information about who I am, and acknowledge that someone else may be teaching the course. This isn’t something that should be obscured. After all, enlightenment is a process that we navigate as a community, through a myriad of unique voices and vantage points. Someone else teaching the class is not a necessary evil; it’s another chance for students to hear about all of these topics from a different perspective (GSOLE, 2024, Tenets 4.1 & 4.2).

[15] If creating a departmental course shell that is open and honest was a key goal, so too was providing faculty with an accessible guide to the course and to how it could quickly be personalized. Hewett (2015) relates that the CCCC OWI Committee recommends designing universal course shells that attempt to make the best of both worlds: "As we advocate for more agency for instructors, we also should acknowledge that these pre-designed shells offer an opportunity to OWI programs to develop accessible courses from bottom up without duplicating effort and with minimal investment in instructional design and curricular personnel" (63) (GSOLE, 2024, Principle 2). To this end, an instructor-only resource page has its own personalized walkthrough of the course and the philosophy that underwrites it as well as a guide for how to quickly and efficiently personalize the content (GSOLE, 2024, Tenet 2.2).

[16] This approach, again, builds on Lang’s (2016) "small teaching" belief. Teachers are advised to watch the brief contextual videos at the top of each page and then record themselves saying something similar. They can simply read the video transcripts, but my advice is to work from memory so that the delivery feels more natural. Using this strategy, a faculty member could make themselves the face of a class in just one day and gain a full understanding of the course in the process. However, recognizing that contingent faculty may be stretched across multiple classes, the videos and design take into account that this might not be possible. This "small teaching" solution fulfills Stommel’s (2018) call to "create closer collaborative relationships between teachers and instructional designers," which in turn helps establish viable, interconnected, and empowering environments for students (62). Regardless of which path they follow, all faculty (contingent or full time) are empowered to make the course theirs without worrying about disrupting or "breaking" the class.

4. Efficacy and Further Considerations

[17] Implementing this approach as a broader teaching philosophy led to a steady improvement in student success rates in my first-year writing courses across all modalities (online, ground, hybrid). From the fall of 2021 to the spring of 2024, my student success rate in first-year writing courses was 78.11% compared to an institutional average of 72.4% in the same courses. Once this teaching method was fully implemented (extending from course materials to weekly course updates and all other course-wide engagements in the fall of 2024), my success rate in first-year writing courses rose to 85.14%, as opposed to an institutional average of 77.66%. Both of these numbers, while subject to statistical variance, generally reflect positive gains at FSW. These results, in turn, may reflect the combined influence of the dissemination of the new online course as a default course shell for all online and many ground courses, along with other college-wide professional development initiatives from FSW Online and the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. These initiatives foregrounded instructor presence, with my radical redesign of Composition I serving as one part of this effort.

[18] As Baker (2010) notes, the sorts of gains outlined above are the natural byproduct of improving instructor presence," and its ability to "positively impact students' affective learning, cognition, and motivation" (24). Just as importantly, my own experience as a teacher in virtual environments improved too. Up to this point, I had always taught successfully online. My pass rates, while lower than ground courses, were above comparative rankings at my institution, and students were happy with and learned from my courses. However, teaching online too often felt more like moderating and grading than active teaching. Using these videos not only brought my presence fully into the course, it also allowed me to become more of an active teacher and reduced the disconnect that can sometimes creep into online learning situations. Another benefit was that videos reduced the volume of emails from students asking about content already explained in the resources. When a student did have a question that the video answered, I could respond instantly by pointing them to the appropriate resource.

[19] Beyond my own experience, the central goal of this endeavor was to support my full-time and part-time colleagues in their teaching (GSOLE, 2024, Principle 4). Not only were my peers satisfied with the resources, but in an unanticipated development, many instructors ported the resources over to their ground classes, using the videos as a co-teacher of sorts (GSOLE, 2024, Tenet 4.1). This was even more true for newer teachers and some of our older adjunct faculty, one of whom put it this way in a conversation with me: "I announce, ‘let’s see what Scott has to say about this’ and then we use the video as a springboard for our work." During technical explanations, instructors could pause videos, add their opinions, and then continue playing, building a rapport with the virtual version of me, which often joked about how scattered and distraction-prone I am—traits that became especially visible with my one-take approach. The segmented videos in this way helped to provide moments of respite, support, and levity even beyond their original purpose.

[20] The videos are also useful for instructors teaching blended formats at FSW. In this modality, classes meet once a week instead of twice a week, and the content that would be covered in the class’s second meeting is instead covered virtually. Students are drawn to this format for different reasons: some enjoy the in-person experience but have scheduling constraints, while others prefer online courses but want occasional face-to-face interaction to balance their experience. Blended courses can be challenging for faculty because they require quite a bit of juggling and alignment. However, the new departmental course and the in-person experience the contextual videos replicate have made it easier for teachers, including myself, to venture into this modality.

[21] Perhaps the biggest surprise in implementing this course design strategy has been how reluctant many faculty are to record themselves, even with the support of the user guide. In my exuberance, I had forgotten just how intimidating it can be to create videos featuring our own faces, and how, with time always in short supply, activities needing additional work, even short pockets of it, can be untenable. Furthermore, relying so heavily on videos, as main learning resources and then again as short conversational videos, made the task more daunting than it may have been with a more sparsely ornamented Canvas shell. The consequence of this was that I inadvertently became the face of the class at our college and, because of the essential nature of Composition I and the reach of our college, within the community more broadly. Students now introduce themselves and mention the class and its videos at a rate higher than anything I’ve ever encountered as an instructor, from the hallways, to fast-food drive-thrus, to fellow parents at my children’s soccer games. The interactions have been universally positive, but because these are often students I never taught personally, I am caught off guard each time.

[22] Still, these conversations have been a wonderful way to connect with students, help them feel seen, and, most importantly, obtain feedback on the class and how it is being taught as part of a commitment to continued improvement (GSOLE, 2024, Principle 3). My follow-up response is always to ask how they like the course and how the experience has been. When they have pointed out issues, I’ve worked to fix them, from adding a FAQ page for a mapped essay project (both for students and to guide faculty who might need more help with technical problems) to simplifying and streamlining the research tutorial resources. While some of these issues might have been unearthed through standard course surveys and instructor feedback, this avenue provides a direct view into the student experience. For whatever reason, some students are more comfortable sharing their opinions during in-person conversations with someone that they see as interested in their well-being, particularly for older, nontraditional students. Perhaps most importantly, the fact that students feel comfortable stopping me to have such conversations is an indicator that they feel seen and valued as individuals within the course (GSOLE, 2024, Tenet 3.1).

[23] When online classes are designed in this manner, the unintended outcomes described above seem unavoidable, and although faculty could be required to produce personal connection videos, I would not recommend that path for ethical reasons. Instead, course designers should ensure that their contextual videos are direct about the fact that someone else may be teaching the class, embrace that possibility, and make frequent allusions to it (e.g., "When you turn in the assignment, your instructor, if it’s me or someone else, will…"). Perhaps most importantly, teachers of online courses, and those designing universal course shells in particular, should not shy away from appearing on camera and talking directly to students. While it can be intimidating, the level of personal connection that these videos foster is a powerful means of imbuing asynchronous online courses with the human spirit.

5. Recommendations: A Quick User's Guide

[24] When adding content, whether creating announcements, building instructional materials, etc., think about how you might introduce that information to students in a live environment. Also, consider a few clear core concepts that you would like students to come away with. Finally, make sure that you have used leveled headings in the resource to visibly call attention to essential information in categorized sections.

[25] Think about how you might personalize your recording but also don't overdo this to the point where it feels artificial. Just be yourself. For example, consider referencing current events happening in your announcements (an upcoming holiday, an approaching school event, the weather, etc.) so that the information feels timely. You can record on your phone in a unique physical environment--maybe somewhere around campus or a location related to their work (in the library if they are doing research, outside the Writing Center if they are revising an essay, etc.). You might also share a bit about what is happening in your own life so that students get to know you as a person.

[26] To record the information, use your LMS's integrated video program. Many of these programs have a "quick capture" option. For example, Kaltura and Panopto have express capture tools that allow instructors to quickly record videos directly within the LMS as they are editing announcements or other content pages.

[27] Hit the record button wherever you may find yourself, give the explanation in one take, lean into any gaffes as you would in person, and then resist the urge to continue re-recording for the "perfect" video. Remember, this is not your course lecture but conversational, humanized resources meant to build connections.

[28] Take a minute to edit the default captions that your college's video recording program generates. To speed the process up and make it more manageable, the generated transcript can be exported to an AI writing program and streamlined to remove grammar errors and repetitive language not related to content. Be sure to re-read the revised transcript that this program generates.