Lance Lippert, Communication; Steve Hunt, Communication; Patrick O'Sullivan, Communication/CTLT
This project examines the use of mediated immediacy in shaping learning-related outcomes in educational contexts. Immediacy is a construct encompassing the various cues that individuals can use in their interactions to convey affiliation to others. The presenters’ earlier studies identified a variety of immediacy techniques that can be conveyed through communication technologies (e.g., email, web pages, telephone, etc.), resulting in "mediated immediacy." In this session, they will report data collected from students in web-based courses regarding their perceptions of their instructor's degree of immediacy in mediated interactions during the course as well as their perceptions of the instructor's effectiveness and credibility, their own cognitive learning, and their own affective learning. The data hopes to determine whether the level of immediacy that an instructor conveys when communicating via mediated communication predicts important and desirable learning results. This research will provide evidence whether mediated forms of immediacy are also linked to desirable learning outcomes as has been found in research on face-to-face forms of immediacy. University instructors and others who teach in educational institutions or corporate settings and who use mediated communication as part of their instructional approaches could benefit from these findings. The results could also help guide teachers in managing immediacy when communicating with students via mediated channels.
