August 2001 — Features

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Online Lectures: Benefits for the Virtual Classroom

by Alvin Y. Wang and Michael H. Newlin, University of Central Florida

Didactic conversation requires both the instructor and student to be equally engaged in two-way communication. Now consider Web-based courses that rely solely on asynchronous communication. Information that is delivered solely by asynchronous means flows in only one direction at any given time: primarily from the instructor to the student. In effect, didactic communication becomes all but impossible and the learner is rendered a passive recipient of information. We also argue that the extent to which your students obtain information solely by reading the content on your course Web site is the extent to which you have not taken advantage of computer assisted communication. Thus, having your students merely download materials for your Web class is to regress to an earlier stage in the history of distance education: the mail-correspondence course. Instead, we recommend that instructors use chat room technology to facilitate meaningful interaction with their students. In this view, using chat rooms on a regular basis takes the "distance" out of distance education.

Democracy in the Chat Room

Consider an online chat room. There is no podium, front row, back row, stage lights or microphone. The chat room's participants have no discernable race, gender, ethnicity or physical disabilities. Instead, the online chat room is a place where participants are identified by screen names, and their expressed ideas are judged solely on the basis of their merit. In the virtual classroom, instructors are recognized solely by the fact that their screen names are different from their students'. It is a non-intimidating environment where the playing field is level. Instructors still maintain a position of authority during chats. Yet the social dynamic of an online chat room is considerably more egalitarian than in the typical classroom environment. The relative anonymity of students and the fact that they access the chat room from familiar surroundings (i.e., from their home or office computers) engenders a comfort level that is not found in the live classroom.

Students who would never consider speaking out in a conventional classroom are able to do so in an online chat. The consequence is that our online chat rooms become a meeting place for lively and open discussion. Typically, this results in a tremendous increase in student-instructor and student-student interaction compared to conventional courses. At the end of each semester, our students tell us that the online chat room was a liberating experience. In this regard, we believe that online chats fulfill the promise of computer mediated communication: it offers the opportunity for people who are geographically distant to feel interpersonally close to one another.

Social Presence

Research has shown that increasing the social presence of others serves to increase student satisfaction and performance in a computer mediated learning environment (Gunawardena and Zittle 1997). We have found that chat rooms enhance the social presence of instructors and their students in a way that cannot be done by asynchronous communication. Advantages of increased social presence mean that we can give immediate feedback on student questions, provide motivational encouragement, and foster student perceptions that we are genuinely invested, engaged and personally connected with our students' learning experience.