Nowadays, online teaching and learning have become an undeniable part of our lives. I believe all of us look around to google or YouTube when we hear something new which shows how much these platforms conquered our lives. If we see from the positive perspective to online teaching and learning and digital platforms, we get that for the first time digital and online education has changed the arrangement of a classroom which was the same for more than 150 years. But still there are problems and issues that make online learning less effective than in-person which one of them is social presence. Social presence is how people establish themselves to be real (Lowenthal, 2009). The ability of students to project themselves socially and emotionally as well as their capacity to perceive other students as "real people" are described as social presence in the context of online learning. (Boston et al., 2010, p. 68).
I used to teach as an online teacher during the Covid19 quarantine time and I always believed that most of the lesson that we are doing is not beneficial for students as we didn’t know anything about social presence. We were thinking that making just a video recording or doing a zoom meeting with students is all about online education. Most of my lessons were at early morning and nearly all of the students were sleeping during the lesson lol 😊. When I started my MAT journey, although it is also online but it is very different from the online education we were doing as in MAT we were always engaged a lot and we were really feeling ourselves as real people in the class, however still I am against online education from Afghanistan due to our country’s problems in internet connectivity and electricity issues. We faced lots of problems during these months but still I was feeling myself real in all the classrooms as I was always busy doing things related to our course.
Using affective expression is a very important ability for online teachers and learners in order to project themselves as real people. Online teachers should encourage all the students to have a profile picture and if possible, most of the time the cameras should be on in order to be felt more real. There should be different icebreakers in order to not get tired of the class. I remember my Inclusive Education course, while my professor was doing an icebreaker and she asked to show something that is around you that is always with you and you cannot do without it. I was feeling that everyone in the class get alive and was searching for something to show at the camera to the classmates. I couldn’t find anything special to show and when she called my name to open my camera, my daughter opened the door of my room and was trying to convince me to leave the lesson and play with her, I did vice versa and showed her to the class as a special creature of my live and we had the lesson together that day.