Humanizing Online Instruction With AI-Powered Chatbots and Multimedia Introduction: Empirical Advice for Online College Classrooms

Introduction

Online education provides great benefits for learners with regards to flexibility and convenience, capable of delivering content to learners around the globe, as long as they have access to the internet and internet-enabled devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. As more and more courses offered by post-secondary higher education institutions become asynchronous online experiences, learners are able to access course materials on their own timetables from their own locations. However, the convenience and flexibility offered by online education comes with its trade-offs, particularly in the realms of motivation and engagement. Research on the topic of motivation and engagement in online classes, including that from the authors, indicates that online learners can feel isolated and dehumanized, where they are only a set of names on a screen to either their instructors or their fellow students (Rovai, 2002a; 2002b; Rovai & Jordan, 2004; Philangee & Malec, 2017). This inability to create human connections in the online educational space is a challenge that faces many online instructors and learners alike, and there is evidence that this lack of humanization and human interaction has deleterious effects on learners’ ability to engage with online courses. Face-to-face courses often provide the ability for learners to interact with one another and, to a lesser extent, with the instructors, allowing everyone to see each other as fellow human beings with interests and wants. To those in online spaces, and especially asynchronous courses, the learners only know each other from the names and profile pictures provided and whatever tiny amounts of context are doled out via discussion forums and in-course interactions. These limited opportunities for human interaction relegate the learners to passengers on separate parallel vessels, rather than passengers on a single ship, so to speak.