Personal stories give life to a faceless person, just as they do in literature. We come to know, like, love, despise, and sympathize with characters the more we know about them. Online it is very different in the sense that we are communicating interactively, but unless we become ‘real’ to our students, there will be a disconnect between instructor-student that must ultimately interfere with knowledge acquisition, particularly since effective teaching presence has been shown to directly affect the quality of education in online environments based on interactions between students and instructors (Alex – Breeze presentation module 5).