Abstract:

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. 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. 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. Significance was found for student engagement based on the number of discussion posts and length of discussion posts. 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.

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