Speaker Topic – Emotional Presence

Online classes have a reputation for being dry, boring, and unengaging. Both faculty and students struggle to create and participate in highly interactive online learning experiences. This can negatively impact engagement and motivation to persevere for all involved. Emotion science offers a strong, evidence-based solution to this challenge. We’ll explore the literature on how emotion and cognition work together, consider five ways emotions enhance learning, and identify practical strategies for putting emotions to work in our polysynchronous online teaching to enhance social connections and improve students’ motivation, focus, memory, and overall learning.

You’ll hear about topics such as

• The literature behind effective teaching and learning in online environments
• Why emotions work as a secret weapon in the fight for student attention and engagement
• How emotion science helps us teach more equitable and inclusive classes
• Efficient and effective ways to draw on affective science in all disciplines and in all class sizes and formats (even STEM, large enrollment, and other challenging contexts!)