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Abstract
The focus of the present research is on the COVID-19 Pandemic and the response within the higher education community. COVID-19 is short for “coronavirus disease 2019,” the official name given by the World Health Organization. COVID-19 continues to spread through communities and countries across the globe. As such, social distancing, putting space between people to slow the spread of the virus, is essential. The social distancing has created the urgent need for online learning within higher education. Many institutions have online platforms for distance learning, while others do not. This paper highlights key online instructional strategies with a focus on integrating the foundations of emotional intelligence as a means toward developing enhanced methods of teaching within the online learning environment. Various principles of effective online pedagogy are discussed in Pelz’s 2010 work. One key principle is the importance of striving for presence within the online teaching environment. Such presence includes affective, interactive, and cohesive presence. Pelz further explains that the affective presence of the online instructor includes the expression of emotions, feelings, and moods. Drawing primarily from Daniel Goleman’s 1995 work on emotional intelligence, the present research seeks to overlay theories of emotional intelligence with principals of online teaching. Specifically, Goleman asserts that emotional intelligence is an assortment of one’s non-cognitive skills including self-awareness, self-management, self-motivation, empathy, and social skills. Emotional intelligence involves being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and prevent stress from swamping the ability to think. As a response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, each of these components are presented with the goal of providing the online instructor specific tools for success within the online teaching environment.