Keywords
Fully Online Learning, Community of Inquiry Framework, Qualitative Research, Interviews and Course Content Analyses
Abstract
Fully online learning provides flexibility students appreciate but can be impersonal and socially isolating. Students can experience lower achievement and more frequent course withdrawal because they struggle to connect to the content, instructor, and other students. Twelve experienced general education instructors from a large university were interviewed to understand how they notice and support students who are at risk of underachieving or failing fully online courses. Interview data were triangulated using course content analyses from two of the instructors’ online courses. Thematic data analysis was guided by the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework.
Instructors in smaller courses use a variety of strategies to actively notice and support struggling learners, but instructors of large courses relied on more passive strategies. To support students, instructors try to humanize themselves and their courses, be compassionate, generate community within the course, and use effective course design strategies. However, humanizing their courses and being compassionate are emotional labor with the constant effort to be nice, flexible, and accommodating to student’s needs. The emotional labor might potentially lead to burnout and frustration among instructors.
While the CoI framework offers helpful guidance for instructors to provide instructor, social, and cognitive presence in small courses, the framework is less useful in large online courses. CoI also does not account for emotional labor and its costs to instructors. Recommendations for new general education instructors include strategies to support struggling students more efficiently and the need to better support instructors to provide social and instructor presence that scales to larger courses.
Completion Date
2024
Semester
Fall
Committee Chair
Boote. David
Degree
Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)
College
College of Community Innovation and Education
Department
Department of Learning Sciences and Educational Research
Degree Program
Curriculum and Instruction
Format
Identifier
DP0029041
Language
English
Release Date
12-15-2024
Access Status
Dissertation
Campus Location
Orlando (Main) Campus
STARS Citation
Taylor, Tori Jayne, "Supporting Online Student Success via Online Instructor Best Practices" (2024). Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024. 74.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd2024/74
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