I just uploaded a video to YouTube and submitted it to a Virtual Teaching Forum hosted at my university, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I have been a political science professor there since 2009 and since my very first year (when I started teaching online with no clue what I was doing) I have been researching ways to improve online teaching and learning.

You can check out the video here: https://youtu.be/qRVHNxgBpTU. I hope you do, because I am really proud of it. Also, it’s only five minutes long, so it’s not a huge investment of your time. In the video, I try to convince my university that it should invest in training faculty in how to teach online classes with rapport.

In this era of booming online teaching, fewer college and university administrators need to be convinced that they should care about online teaching. However, in doing so, many tend to turn to technology instead of investing in people. The past 13 years of teaching and researching online have taught me that people are much more important than technology. The way I talk about it in my book, “Connecting in the Online Classroom: Building Rapport between Teachers and Students” (Johns Hopkins, 2021), is through emphasizing the importance of relationships. Building rapport with students is about showing genuine care, demonstrating that you want students to succeed, and connecting on a human level.

If that may sound a little too touchy-feely to you, don’t worry, I have plenty of cold, hard numbers to back up this approach. In the video, I attempt to persuade my university to this approach by citing this experimental study I published in the Journal of Political Science Education, which shows that teaching with rapport increases retention by 13.5%, completely eliminating the retention gap between online and face-to-face students (see Figure 3.2 from my book, below).

In the video I also share retention data from my own intro-level political science classes over time. I am a little sheepish about these data because they show just how not-good I was at online teaching when I first started and how it took me some time to get better (also, my son was born in 2012; those first couple of years are rough, folks…).

You may also notice a little dip there in 2020. You may recall a global pandemic started that spring, so that semester was a little rough on all of us. But I am so impressed with my students and their resilience (and honestly, how hard I hustled to support and connect with them), because look at that rebound! Retention was right back up at over 80% in 2021.

I think these data are pretty compelling. But will I be successful in convincing my university to invest in rapport-building? Well, I’ve been doing this research for 13 years, so many colleagues and administrators at my university know about my findings. I’ve presented them at college brown bags, in summer faculty trainings, and to our Academy of Teaching and Learning Excellence. The lure of EdTech is strong. Building relationships with students takes time and effort. Buying new technology can be easier, even if it is more expensive. The Virtual Teaching Forum is in March, 2022. I will let you know how it goes.