I believe letting my personality shine through the way I teach “humanizes” the online learning experience. One of the ways I have tried to do this is through my office hour sessions. I have developed some ways to inject a little more of my personality and enthusiasm for vertebrate life through additional activities the students can engage with at their discretion, including: Supplementary lectures exploring certain topics in the course in more detail, such as phylogenetic reconstruction methods Software tutorials such as Mendeley citation manager and using Google Scholar to locate and browse  primary sources Livestreaming my research activities, such as preparing vertebrate natural history specimens, and talking  with students about how they could perform similar activities at home with their dissection specimens Perhaps most importantly, guided pre-exam study sessions and post-exam review sessions.      None of these activities are required of course – my ...

If you’ve ever scheduled virtual office hours, the first time may have gone something like this:  you picked a nice time slot when you were available, you shared a meeting URL with your students, you tidied up the background of your desk area, you logged in eager to connect with your students to finally get to know some of them, and then… nobody. You may have thought, “The students will be a few minutes late. No one shows up to a party when it starts.” You answered a few quick emails, and then clicked back on the conference to see if anyone silently logged in, only to see your own face filling the screen, aging in real-time. As you dejectedly logged off, you may have wondered if you should switch to “by request only” meetings if your time is so clearly unappreciated (more on that topic later). Most online instructors have some variation on that story, leading to surprise and disappointment when they don’t get to connect with their online students and have some of the personal co...