Teachers in fully online courses face the challenge of achieving students' satisfaction - usually measured using students' surveys - as it is known to affect engagement and motivation, which in turn improves learning outcomes. This challenge grows in complexity with the number of students enrolled in the course. In this paper we report an attempt to improve students' perception on their teacher in a massive online academic writing course. In the experimental group the way contents were delivered was changed, the same as the role teachers had. Content was embedded in a story and the teacher acted as the presenter of each chapter during the course. Results showed that students' perception improved significantly, particularly on how they perceived the teacher's availability. © 2011 IEEE.