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Humanizing Online Instruction has been a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the Canvas Open Network since 2013. The course was designed to connect people who were interested in exploring new tools and teaching methods in a space where they could practice and play with colleagues from around the world. The course wayfinders have included a number of fantastic educators and learning designers including Sam Brenton, Samantha Duque, Robin Bartoletti, Dave Hallmon, Matt Crosslin, Patrice Torcivia, and Maha Al-Freih. The course has run multiple times, has been cleared by ethics committees for three different IRBs and has produced 5 peer-reviewed journal publications (that we know of) and a dissertation with a second dissertation in the works. These publications would not have been possible without the generous contributions from the HumanMOOC community to participate in the research studies we have conducted.

As a community, we have agreed that the human element is necessary in online courses. The current issue facing online learning is how to incorporate presence through human interaction and learning technologies in order to deliver a more powerful sense of instructor, social, and cognitive presence. During the second run of the course, I asked participants of the HumanMOOC if they would like to share their own personal stories and produce the HumanMOOC Book. This book has been a joy to put together and it is my privilege to get to share this openly and make it free for everyone to read digitally (printed copies aren’t free as one would assume).

The HumanMOOC participants have critically evaluated the use of synchronous and asynchronous tools to enhance teaching, social, and cognitive presence in order to meet the needs of distance learners. Their stories demonstrate teaching presence (sometimes referred to as instructor presence) and showcase their stories of methods of monitoring and managing student progress via audio and video. Authors of the chapters also share their own HumanMOOC experiences and highlight what worked and didn’t for them.

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