Steve Kolowich's claim that including more audio and video in online courses is important certainly contains some truth.... I've experienced this myself when we included just a few homemade clips in our course in which we did little else than explain to each other what we had already written in the course introduction. No new information, unprofessional video, but students appreciated them. Just like they appreciated the online question hours in our virtual classroom, even though most of them did not even participate :-)
This is the human touch, I would agree, but not necessarily audio or video... What works is that we show explicitly that we care about what happens to our students. Answering questions on the discussion board promptly, or e-mailing a student who seems to have dropped out are equally if not more effective.
Yesterday evening I spent 20 minutes on the phone with a student from the other side of the world. I am convinced that I could have answered her questions equally well in writing, in fact I think the answers were already on the discussion board and she did probably read them. I told her nothing new, but the fact that I was willing to talk to her on a Friday evening from home will probably motivate her to spend at least 10 hours more on my course. Maybe 20 even because of the little chat about my ten year old son who was playing computer games. That, I think, is the human touch.
By the way, incorporating audio and video in Blackboard is no longer impossible, certainly not with the incorporation of the virtual classroom Elluminate. Not that I am a big Blackboard fan, though :-)
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