Broadband: a solution to rural e-learning?

Rural and remote learners are disadvantaged even with online provision due to poor connections. Broadband offers a potential solution. This paper looks at the initial results of a project to install broadband services in the Western Isles of Scotland. It focuses on the educational potential of broadband and the design implications for online courses. It also considers more informal kinds of learning that broadband facilitates in rural areas

Community College Faculty Members’ Perceptions Of Creating Digital Content To Enhance Online Instructor Social Presence

Current technologies, specifically asynchronous video, allow instructors to enhance their online instructor social presence (OISP) by creating digital content in which they can simultaneously convey their unique persona verbally and nonverbally while supplementing course content. A strong OISP has been shown to contribute toward students’ successful course completion, which continues to be an issue at community colleges. Existing research on the use of digital content to enhance OISP, however, has primarily focused on students’ perceptions even though faculty members are responsible for establishing OISP. The purpose of this study was to ascertain community college faculty members’ perceptions of creating asynchronous videos (i.e., digital content) to enhance OISP; specifically, OISP enhancements related to verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors, successful course completion, and recognition from their institution for the effort required to create digital content. A sampling frame of faculty members who teach online courses at five Midwestern U. S. community colleges were invited to participate in this quantitative study by completing the web-based survey. Responses from 91 faculty members were ultimately used to conduct the main analyses to determine if faculty members with different demographic characteristics, digital content creation, or self-reported student course completion rates differ significantly in terms of their perceptions. The results indicated 45.6% of faculty members create digital content, while 27.8% of them do not but would like to. No significant differences were found between faculty members who do, do not, or would like to create digital content. However, there were several noticeable differences between their response mean levels for intentionally demonstrated verbal/nonverbal immediacy behaviors, digital content use as a contributing factor toward student’s successful course completion, and institutional recognition for effort required to create digital content. Additionally, strong positive correlations were found between verbal immediacy behaviors, nonverbal immediacy behaviors, and digital content use impacting successful course completion. Study results offer preliminary insight to community college faculty members and administrators about the percent and demographics of community college faculty members who are using asynchronous video to create digital content, how frequently faculty members are audible or visible in their digital content, and their perceptions of digital content creation

Creating Verbal Immediacy - The Use of Immediacy and Avoidance Techniques in Online Tutorials

Like many writing center directors, I was hesitant to introduce online tutoring. However, because of limited physical space on campus, the internet provides the only room for growth available to us—a problem faced by many writing centers (Carpenter 2). The inevitability of online growth is also supported by the increase of tertiary-level online and blended courses being offered at most post-secondary schools. I was hesitant to begin online tutoring because [of] the “complexities introduced by online tutoring: the increased potential for directive tutoring instead of nondirective tutoring . . . the lack of sustained dialogue in asynchronous tutorials, and technological problems of accessibility and compatibility” (Kastman Breuch 21). In a conscious effort to avoid some of these issues, when the writing lab I direct began providing online tutorials in spring 2010. Our staff chose to use a software product called ShowDocument.com that allows students to upload their drafts and then share an interactive white board with the tutor to annotate the paper being discussed while synchronously chatting. The program does not have an audio or video function, so participants type their messages. We considered using a program such as Skype that would allow the tutor and student to see each other as they speak. However, technology is never completely trustworthy, and the ongoing issues of poor, broken, or failed transmission made Skype and similar programs an unreliable choice. Second, the close confines in which we work make the noise level in our lab high, and students themselves often login to video conferences from their dorms, or apartments, where background distractions can greatly impede the tutorial. Finally, as Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch suggests, we learned that we could not assume that all of our students who use the online service have access to equipment that enables them to use Skype or similar programs (21).University Writing Cente

The DISCOVER Model: A Prescriptive Method for Instructional Tool Selection and Use in Seeking to Boost Instructor Immediacy and Social Presence in Online Courses

Higher education faculty who teach online can face numerous challenges in providing optimal experiences for their students. Besides their potentially limited instructional design expertise and understanding of how to optimize technology to support learning, faculty may have difficulties in finding ways to make themselves be perceived as real people who are approachable, caring, and likeable due to online nature of the learning context. As a preliminary means to address these issues, the current study focused on the development of the DISCOVER Model, which was designed to provide higher education faculty with a framework to develop actionable plans in the creation of audio and video media assets while focusing on best practices to boost student perceptions of instructor immediacy and instructor social presence. This model, developed as an enhancement to the ADDIE model of instructional design, provides a sequence of eight steps across design and development, and implementation and evaluation phases, that guide instructors through making informed choices in creating media assets and revising them. This mixed-method study took place at a university in the Appalachian region of the United States and focused on two undergraduate courses and two graduate courses taught by three instructors. The instructors used The DISCOVER Model to create media assets for their courses and 136 students opted into completing an online survey about their experiences that sought to measure their perceptions of instructor immediacy and social presence. Instructors participated in regular meetings and a summative interview with the researcher and six students were interviewed. Instructors were also assigned model adherence scores by the researcher based on how closely they were perceived to follow the model in creating their media assets. The results indicated that instructors who showed high model adherence had students who indicated moderately high perceptions of instructor social presence and immediacy. Further, graduate students indicated higher perceptions of social presence perceptions than undergraduate students. Findings and implications were discussed

Humanizing and Establishing Presence in an Online Course: The Role of Introductory Videos in Distance Learning

Some faculty may find it difficult, if not impossible, to provide a similar classroom experience online as is provided typically in a face to face class. Faculty members can find it even more difficult to establish an instructional relationship with students in an online course as they do in a face-to-face course. Online learning is known to be more solitary and students report that they feel somewhat disconnected from the class when they take a course online. The challenge in designing online courses is for faculty members to establish their teaching presence by humanizing the online classroom experience for their students. The authors use the community of inquiry model developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) to examine the attributes of teaching presence in an online course. This study evaluates students\u27 perceptions relating to the significance of producing a video for an online course that introduces the instructor to students and see if a specific introductory video will help to establish the instructor\u27s teaching presence for the students

Asynchronous Video and the Development of Instructor Social Presence and Student Engagement

Enrollment in online learning continues to grow in the higher education sector, along with persistent goals dedicated to achieving better student outcomes and lowering attrition rates. Improved student engagement has been shown to possibly reduce attrition rates through a greater sense of connectedness and decreased feelings of isolation among online learners. Through the development of a classroom community, the online learner may feel supported and engage more often in the learning process. The instructor plays a major role in the development of the classroom community. Instructor social presence may be the most important factor in building the relationships that foster learning and retention. Through communication, the instructor conveys the necessary immediacy behaviors required to cultivate these interpersonal relationships. Discovering methodology that can facilitate the development of instructor social presence and foster student engagement is necessary for improving online learning outcomes and retention. With improved technology that allows for enhanced communication in online classrooms, the use of asynchronous video may be an effective way to improve instructor social presence and student engagement. This quasi-experimental design aimed to determine whether asynchronous video or text-based communication increased students’ perceptions of instructor social presence and student engagement in an online graduate classroom. After analyzing the data, significance was found for student engagement based on the number of discussion posts, p=.003, and length of discussion posts, p=.012. Students in the group who received text-based communication demonstrated increased student engagement in voluntary discussion boards as opposed to students in the group who received asynchronous video. There was no significant difference found for instructor social presence between the two groups, p=.136. The participants of the study were students enrolled in two sections of an online Masters of Occupational Therapy foundation course during the spring of 2017. All participants attended the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences

Multimedia Design, Learning Effectiveness, and Student Perceptions of Instructor Credibility and Immediacy

Online learning and the use of multimedia is a quickly growing element of higher education. This experimental research study examines five common audio and video presentation designs to inform evidence-based practices that can be applied by instructional designers as they develop content for online learners. Specifically, this experiment compares instructor-only, slides-only, dual-windows, video-switching, and superimposed-slides multimedia designs in terms of learning effectiveness, perceived instructor credibility, instructor immediacy, and cognitive load created by each design. This study included a diverse sample of adult learners who were randomly assigned to treatment groups. A total of 171 participants completed the study and responded to the NASA Task Load Index (TLX) used to gauge task and cognitive load, the credibility and immediacy survey, and the 20-item post-test. A series of 5x1 Analyses of Variance and Tukey post-hoc calculations were conducted to test for statistically significant differences between groups. The results suggest that a balance can be established between instructor credibility and immediacy by showing both the instructor and instructional content during online classes. The five multimedia designs can yield similar results in recall and comprehension as long as audio, video, and content quality is a design priority. The results also indicate that the design of instructional methods has a greater impact on learning than the device used to receive that instruction. Media and technology are a means to deliver pedagogy and foster communication; it is up to instructors and designers to use evidence-based best practices such as these to build optimal learning environments and instructional systems

Online and Face-to-Face Classes: A Comparative Analysis of Teaching Presence and Instructor Satisfaction

Teaching presence is one of three components of the Community of Inquiry Model proposed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000). This study examined teaching presence, as measured by the instructional design and organization, and directed facilitation (Shea, Li, Swan, and Pickett, 2005), in a large undergraduate science course, contrasting two modes of lecture delivery, face-to-face and online video. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the teaching presence instrument, producing factor loadings similar to Shea et al.\u27s for both online and face-to-face delivery. Analysis of the relationship between instructor satisfaction and teaching presence (instructional design and organization, and directed facilitation) produced a significant (p \u3c 0.05) but relatively weak (r = .50) correlation. Differences between mean instructor satisfaction and teaching presence scores showed no significant differences based on the mode of lecture delivery. Advisor: Allen Steckelber