You are definitely applying effective strategies for establishing and maintaining relationships among your students and between yourself and your students. The posting of a bio is the first assignment we recommend for any course. One of the areas less likely to be addressed is having adequate knowledge of the entry-level of students in your course. When there are pre-requisites for your course, you can discern entry-level knowledge and skills by reviewing the Syllabus of the prerequisite course; or if the Professor of that course is available, you can discuss the nature of what he or she has coverd in the prerequisite course. I have trained a Professor a few months ago who was developing an online version of his course. There is another course in the program upon which his course builds. In addition, he acknowledged that the expectations of students enrolling in his course could have varied from one student to another; nevertheless, he wanted to strike a balance in the content domain of his course so that he could fulfill the majority of his students' expectations. He decided to conduct a survey to identify the expectations of his online students. He also reviewed the student course evaluation of the course to which his course is related. Although time and budgetary constraints can pose an obstacle to these measures this professor wanted to take to ensure that his online course is in sync with the expectations of his students, I commended him for this effort; as having evaluated the conditions under which he would be developing his course, I believe the data he targeted would be of value to him. Not very often are some Professors able to clearly define the entry-level knowledge and skills of their students. A properly designed survey can help them to gain an understanding of the entry-level knowledge and skills. By reviewing other courses that are related to their courses, including prerequisite courses, they would have a better foundation upon which to develop a course to match the needs of their students.