“I will never forget my first day of school. My mom woke me up, got me dressed, made my bed, and fed me. Man, did the guys in the dorm tease me.”
—Michael Aronin
Students form impressions of teachers quickly.
Open a class with a joke or a funny quote and you send a simple message: this might actually be interesting. As humorist Herbert Gardner once noted, “Once you get people laughing, they’re listening.”
In the traditional classroom, students usually wait until the end of the first lecture before declaring, “This class is going to suck.”
Online classes shrink that decision window dramatically.
Minutes.
Sometimes seconds.
The first session of a virtual course is a lot like Tinder—students make snap judgments and swipe accordingly.
Online instruction shares another feature with Tinder.
Both are visually driven environments.
Looks matter.
That means instructors should begin with some kind of visual hook that signals personality and engagement. For example:
a silly subtitle on the first slide
a funny image or cartoon
a reformatted quote
a humorous caption
even a slightly embarrassing childhood photo of the instructor
These quick visual cues can immediately humanize the instructor and signal that the class won’t be a forty-five-minute talking head.
Educators—especially college professors—often resist the idea that teaching should be entertaining. In the traditional classroom it’s easier to defend that position.
But online instruction isn’t the traditional classroom.
It’s a screen.
And when students are staring at a screen, presentation matters.
If you want your class to survive the first few minutes of Educational Tinder, give students a reason to swipe right.
