There’s a term for the anxiety many novice instructors feel about the online teaching-learning environment. It’s called “transactional distance.” This relates to the dissonance of feeling “distant” or disconnected from one’s students when one is used to only teaching face-to-face.
Tisha Bender, in Discussion-Based Online Teaching To Enhance student Learning (Stylus, 2013), identifies the pedagogical components that can mitigate the discomfort of transactional distance (something that potentially affects both teacher and student online). What is interesting to note is that they are the same things that are applicable in the classroom learning environment:
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