As an online instructor, how often should you communicate with your students? This is an important issue. I try to repeat information multiple times in my online course. For example, when I post instructions for online work on Moodle, I will also email students telling them that the instructions are on Moodle. I will also send follow-up emails to students who I haven’t seen online after a reasonable period of time.
The timing, content, and frequency of such emails are important issues to consider. As well, the time required to email individual students has to be managed by the instructor.
One piece of research that relates to these questions was conducted in 2008 by ChanMin Kim and John M. Keller. Kim and Keller were interested in using instructor email to increase personal contact between the instructor and students in large f2f classes. They argued that students’ vulnerability to distractions, lack of motivation, or poor academic skills could be ameliorated by increased contact with the instructor. They questioned whether or not general email messages could be effective, or whether personalized emails would be required. Clearly, the latter require increased instructor time and effort.
Kim and Keller studied 101 undergraduate students in a regular archaeology course. The students completed a questionnaire about their satisfaction with their achievement in the course following their first exam. Those students who indicated low satisfaction were placed in a Personal Message group slated to receive an email from the instructor addressed to them by name and containing specific information about strategies to help them do well in the course based on their questionnaire responses.
The students who indicated after the first exam that they were satisfied with their achievement in the course so far were placed in a Non-personal Message group. Their email from the instructor would not address them by name and would contain more general information about studying and so on.
Both groups then received a pre-test to measure their motivation for the course, the number of hours a week they were studying for it, and an exam on the course material. Later, they received their Personal or Non-personal email message from the instructor, and a month after the pre-test, motivation, hours spent studying and exam grade were assessed again.
The results were interesting. Let’s hold off for a minute considering how they relate to online learning.
The measures of motivation showed no difference in interest in the course between the two groups. Both groups reported an increase in their rating of course relevance – it appeared to rise dramatically for the Personal Message group although Kim and Keller unfortunately did not report a significance test on this difference. Confidence in their ability to meet their course goals dropped for both groups, but interestingly, it dropped less for the Personal Message group, and their confidence AFTER the instructor email was higher than for the Non-personal Message group.
There were no significant differences between the groups in the number of hours they reported studying per week, or in the change before and after the instructor email.
Finally, the analysis of exam grades showed that the Non-personal Message Group performed better on all exams compared to the Personal Message Group (not surprising, given that this group was more satisfied initially with how they were doing). However, while the Non-personal Message group achieved better grades both before and after the instructor's email, there was greater improvement in the group who had received the personal message - in fact the exam grade average in the Non-personal Message group went down at the post-test.
Kim and Keller concluded that personal contact between student and instructor for relatively poorly-performing students is important in terms of achievement and motivation. The results for better-performing students are not so clear.
What does this all mean for online students and instructors?
Balancing the time it takes to gather information from students about their needs, the additional time it takes to generate personalized responses, and the potential effects on student achievement will be challenging. Kim and Keller’s study raises a raft of questions about instructor presence in online learning such as:
· Should online students receive additional obligatory institutional support in the form of academic skills training specifically targeted to online learning outside of the specific course-focused content from their instructor? This relates to underlying issues around understanding who takes online courses, student level of ease with online instruction, reasons for taking online courses and attrition in online courses.
· Do instructors have enough time to respond to needs of individual online students? When the primary mode of communication is written, instructor feedback needs to be clear, precise, informative, carefully-constructed, and with understanding of the potential impact of communicating without the non-verbal cues present in f2f interactions.
· What level of email support is ideal for the majority of online students? How much personal contact is effective for increasing student motivation, achievement, understanding, etc?
· What other modes of communication in online courses are most effective? Instructors have a variety of communication means available such as phone, Skype, audio messaging, synchronous chats, etc.
· What level of institutional support do instructors require for online teaching, especially new online instructors?
I’ll look at some of this research in a future post.
References
Kim, C., & Keller, J. M. (2008). Effects of motivational and volitional email messages (MVEM) with personal messages on undergraduate students’ motivation, study habits and achievement. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(1), 36–51. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00701.x
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