August 2001 — Features

Print this article

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal

Online Lectures: Benefits for the Virtual Classroom

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

This feeling of community works both ways. As the instructor, you will feel more involved with your students to the point where you will recognize them as specific individuals during chats, as opposed to a mass of students in a conventional lecture hall. This sense of belonging in the learning community has helped us stay interested and focused on the learning process for each of our students.

Many students have reported feelings of isolation and loneliness when involved with online classes. In this regard, it should be noted that the "loneliness" of the distance learner not only describes the experience of some cyber-students, but may also relate to the experience of their Web instructors (Laird 1999). As we have noted in the preceding sections, it is through the use of synchronous chat rooms that instructors and their students can overcome the impersonal nature of asynchronous communication. We urge instructors to develop techniques whereby technology is used to foster rather than hamper social interactivity in the classroom. To reiterate, chat rooms are the most effective means for taking the "distance" out of distance education.

Student Perceptions of Chats

On a pragmatic note, instructors can also monitor students' chat room activity for signs of success or failure in the virtual classroom. For instance, we performed a discourse analysis of student remarks in chats during week three of the semester (Wang and Newlin 2001 a). We found that the total number of student comments and the frequency in which a student responded to a query by the instructor correlated significantly with final grades in the class at week 15. Put another way, students who rarely interact in the chat room and who do not respond to instructor questions tend to earn poor grades in class. Hence, instructors should monitor the frequency and type of chat room activity in order to predict students' performance on graded components of the class. This is important because, in the absence of conventional classroom cues (i.e., fidgeting, quizzical expressions, inattentiveness), students' chat room activity can become a valuable tool for assessing and predicting students' involvement in the virtual classroom.

For several semesters, we have given end-of-semester surveys assessing our students' perceptions of the components of our online class. These surveys ask students to rate each component in terms of its effectiveness in promoting successful learning. Among the course components that students evaluated (e-mail, forum postings, Web pages), we have found that chat rooms were among the highest ratings. This is particularly true for students who previously took online courses that did not use regularly scheduled chats. In many of these cases, students' open-ended responses indicated that they wished all of their online classes had synchronous chat rooms. Their overwhelmingly positive evaluations of this form of interactivity corroborates the findings of Presby (2001), who has also urged online instructors to develop ways of maintaining personal contact with their students.

The Learning Moment

An experience that teachers recount with pride and accomplishment is that instance when, through their efforts, a flash of insight, or an epiphany, occurs for a student.