A 'Live' Instructor- Does it Matter?

Overview: When quantitative and qualitative measures of student satisfaction in a well-regarded MSW asynchronous course dropped, this demanded further investigation. The results highlight how synchronous interactions between students and instructors do more than provide comprehension of course content.Proposal text: As many of us anticipate teaching online social work courses far into the future, it is important to learn from our missteps. Reflexive teaching requires we investigate when we excel and when we fail to improve our pedagogy (Douglas et al., 2016). This poster presentation will demonstrate an in-depth exploration of negative feedback I received about a course and the crucial role that the perception of the instructor plays in online students’ experiences and help participants identify their own efforts to share themselves with their students.

Despite long established positive quantitative and qualitative student feedback around a MSW online theory course, my Fall 2020 student evaluations demonstrated reduced scores with 'Instructor Effectiveness' dropping from an average of 4.78/5 over eleven sections to 4.5/5 in two sections in Fall 2020. The qualitative comments corroborated this student dissatisfaction particularly around my feedback tone.

After considering that the course content, weekly videos, thorough feedback, and assignments were consistent, I realized the major change was that I did not integrate four synchronous learning opportunities into the course that term. These had never been primary vehicles of communicating content, but a chance to connect around questions and process. Interactions with peers and the instructor have been identified as major benefits of synchronous classes, while the drawbacks of asynchronous courses include isolation and distance from the instructor (Lin & Gao, 2020). I was seeing this difference in student experience with just the loss of four hours of synchronous connection.

Current literature can help explain this learning issue. Farber and Penney (2020) describe that the instructor relationship fosters social work student growth in the physical classroom (particularly around attunement, warmth, acceptance, curiosity, empathy, challenge, and repair of disconnection). The synchronous meetings I traditionally held and recorded for unavailable students, demonstrated my affection and interest in the students in a way that the videos, emails, announcement, and feedback comments seemed not to. These few online meetings provided students a chance to witness my responsiveness, humor, enthusiasm, and commitment in a way that helped them to understand me. By removing the synchronous meetings my students had less of a sense of who I was, which is so crucial in online courses (Spitz, 2019). Vallade and Kaufman (2018) identify instructor negative communication behaviors as a major dissatisfaction point for students. Without the additional context of my ‘live’ personality, students seemed to interpret my feedback as harsh and critical, shifting their course experience. Park and Kim (2020) describe that student perceptions about instructor presence can strongly affect student satisfaction. When students did not perceive me as an available person, my feedback was not as helpful.

This experience taught me not to underestimate the affirmation and anxiety reduction that live connection can provide students. As much as online students benefit from being known by their instructors (Smoyer, et al., 2020), we educators benefit from being known by our students. The Course Evaluation scores did increase when I resumed the synchronous meetings and now I know better than to remove them.