It Helped Push Me Through the Class’: Community College Student Perceptions of the Role of Instructor Immediacy Behaviors in Completing an Online Course

Abstract

For decades, the number of students enrolling in online courses has been increasing, and this trend toward online education has been further intensified as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The completion rate of online courses is not as high as in-person instruction, and researchers and practitioners have long been invested in identifying ways in which online education can be optimized. One dimension of online education that has received scholarly attention is the transactional distance that exists between students and instructors, which, if not appropriately minimized, can lead to a variety of negative student outcomes. Scholars have also identified a variety of verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors that can help online instructors decrease this transactional distance and promote a variety of positive student outcomes. To date, the study of immediacy behaviors in online college courses has focused primarily on four-year institutions utilizing quantitative methods. As complement to this research, we interviewed 12 community college students to better understand how a particular set of immediacy behaviors (i.e., a “welcome” phone call, sending personalized emails, using humor, creating videos, and sending “check-in” emails) influenced students’ desire and ability to remain in and complete an online course. Implications of these findings for practice and future research are discussed.