The online instructor provides ongoing answers for students’ non-content related, but emotion-related questions. This type of response is helpful for avoiding students’ dropouts during a course.
Published in Chapter:
Instructor Feedback, Learner Satisfaction, and Online Learning
Yuliang Liu (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA)
Copyright: © 2012
|Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-762-3.ch029
Abstract
Instructor feedback, learner satisfaction, and online learning are currently significant topics in online instruction. According to Blignaut and Trollip (2003), there are six response types for the instructors to provide formative feedback in online courses. These include: administrative, affective, other, corrective, informative, and Socratic. The first three types involve no academic content, while the last three types are related to academic content in the online course. Each type serves a unique purpose for online instruction and learning. This article integrates, summarizes, compares, and contrasts the author’s two recent studies. The first study involved 42 graduate students in the Summer semester of 2008. The second study involved 48 graduate students in the Fall semester of 2008. In both studies, the instructor used these six response types to provide formative feedback to improve learner satisfaction and online learning in an online graduate class at a Midwestern university in the United States. Results indicated that all six response types are required to ensure maximum online learner satisfaction and effective online learning. The results have implications for teacher education and other online courses.