The problem addressed in the study was the curriculum strategies higher education instructors need to strengthen the oral communication skills of online undergraduate students had not yet been identified. (Butz & Askim-Lovseth, 2015). McBain, et al., (2016) noted that in the future there is a need for research on how organizations should help instructors understand more about the opportunities online oral communication tasks offer. Also noted was how the work to develop oral communication tasks could bring the student appreciable gains. Online instructors do not have a set of strategies to follow that would indicate the teaching behavior needed to more effectively increase oral skill in online students. Some online instructors are uncertain what skills are needed to improve the public speaking assignment because the public speaking course curriculum is traditionally taught on ground campuses (Van Ginkel, Gulikers, Biemans, & Mulder, 2015).
This problem is key to online instructors charged with teaching students to deliver an oral presentation which is defined as giving an address to a public audience. When a speech is given in a silo without many people in attendance the author of the speech does not receive the same kind of immediate feedback as in a live well attended audience (Van Ginkel, et al., 2015). The researcher identified specific curriculum strategies as a possible model for online instructors teaching oral communication. The study fills a gap in exploring the general problem of online oral communication deficiencies and communicate the best practices for teaching the public speaking assignment to undergraduate students in an online course.