NOVA Online to Offer Online Teaching Webinar, Oct. 1

NOVA Online will offer a series of webinars to promote faculty peer sharing and best practices in teaching online and hybrid courses throughout a semester in the NOVA community. The first webinar for the fall is “Communication and Social Presence for Student Success in Online Courses” on Thursday, October 1, from 12 p.m. until 1 p.m.

Webinar Description: Asynchronous online courses often have an enormous amount of information for students to go through in order to know exactly what is expected of them. Being entirely online, these courses also risk alienating students from their instructors, which may result in loss of motivation by the students. Fortunately, these challenges can be alleviated through good communication between instructor and student, as well as through an increase in the instructor’s social presence within the course.

In this webinar Dr. Omar Saab will share how he effectively uses seven communication methods in his online courses to keep students informed and make sure that they understand exactly what is required of them in order to succeed in these courses. He will also discuss how he uses some of the above methods in order to increase his social presence by making his students feel that their instructor is constantly active within the course, helping them learn and monitor their progress. Additionally, he will share ways to organize tasks to efficiently achieve these goals and stay on top of the work in facilitating an online course in order to maximize student success.

Saab is an adjunct professor in anatomy and physiology at NOVA Annandale. He has been teaching at NOVA since 2006 and has been teaching online since 2008. In the past, he has taught at Siena College and the College of Saint Rose in the Albany, NY area, at Gwynedd-Mercy College and Montgomery County Community College in the Philadelphia area, as well as locally at Marymount University and George Mason University (GMU). His educational background is in biological sciences. He has earned a B.S. in biology from GMU, an M.S. in zoology from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in neuroscience with distinction from Georgetown University. During the summer, Omar also runs a business that is unrelated to biology, just outside of Beirut, Lebanon. He currently lives in northern Sweden, where he and his wife teach dance as a hobby.

Register for this event Here. Once you have registered, you will receive a Zoom link to attend. If you encounter technical issues accessing the webinar, please call 703-764-5051. Contact Dr. Hong Wang at hwang@nvcc.edu with other questions.