What is the ARCS Model? - John Keller
One of the purposes of an introduction it to help motivate the learners'. A popular motivational design strategy is John Keller's ARCS method. ARCS stands for Attention, Relevance, Comprehension, Satisfaction. Introductions provide a great place to hit on attention and relevance. The other two parts, comprehension and satisfaction, will come later.
Since introductions is a pretty light topic, I thought I would throw in some articles about some principles that cover both online and face-to-face teaching...
Seven Principles of Good Undergraduate Education - Chickering and Gamson
If there was only one piece of Higher Education literature to be aware of, it would be Chickering and Gamson's "Seven Principles of Good Undergraduate Education." Even though they were targeted at face-to-face classes, the seven principles also apply online. In fact, many folks that books about online teaching base a lot of work off the principles.
Adult Learning Theory and Principles - Queensland Occupational Therapy Fieldwork Collective
Although he didn't coin the term, Andragogy, Malcolm Knowles is the name most associated with it. He defined Andragogy as "the art and science of teaching adults." He came up with six principles. Although like Chickering and Gamson's work, Knowles work was done before the 'coming' of online education. However, his work still applies.
Ten Tips and Best Practices for Teaching Online - Boettcher (2011)
These ten tips from practice come from Judith Boettcher. Although we won't go through them specifically, we'll cover many of them as we progress through this process...