Building Immediacy: Strengthening teacher-student relationships through technology applications

Online learning can pose challenges to instructors in building relationships with remote students. Subsequently, the student learning experience can be negatively impacted when intimacy and connection are lacking in the online classroom. How can higher education instructors overcome this dilemma? The good news is that an array of technology tools exists to help instructors increase immediacy, decreasing the physical and psychological distance between people in the online classroom and beyond. This article discusses specific tech tools and methods that can be used to build teacher-student relationships with remote students.