Is It Worth the Effort? The Impact of Incorporating Synchronous Lectures into an Online Course

Abstract

This study explores student achievement, sense of social community, and sense of learning community (Rovai, 2002) in two sections of an online course taught concurrently by the same instructor. One section was delivered in a fully asynchronous format; the other incorporated weekly synchronous lectures using an Adobe Connect environment. Students were randomly assigned to one of the two sections but allowed to change sections (before the semester began) if unwilling or unable to participate in weekly Adobe Connect meetings. Data included grades on course assignments, final course grades, end-of-course evaluations, and responses to the Classroom Community Inventory (Rovai, Wighting & Lucking, 2004). No significant differences were found on measures of academic achievement, student satisfaction, social community, or learning community between the two sections.

Learning and Satisfaction in Webinar, Online, and Face-to-Face Instruction: A Meta-Analysis

“…The present study focused on comparing levels of learning and satisfaction in webinars, online asynchronous learning management systems, and face-to-face classroom instruction. A typical problem related to the examination of webinars and other online environments is small sample size (e.g., Alnabelsi et al, 2015;Olson and McCracken, 2015); consequently, the findings might be biased by artificial variance induced by sampling error. Another problem relates to study design: Quasi-experimental studies often have limited methodological rigor, which can bias research findings and prohibit causal claims.…”

“…We also consulted the reference lists of 12 earlier reviews and meta-analyses of online and distance education (Cook et al, 2008(Cook et al, , 2010Bernard et al, 2009;Means et al, 2009Means et al, , 2013Martin et al, 2014;Schmid et al, 2014;Liu et al, 2016;Margulieux et al, 2016;Taveira-Gomes et al, 2016;McKinney, 2017;Richmond et al, 2017). This second step of the literature search resulted in another three publications (Harned et al, 2014;Alnabelsi et al, 2015;Olson and McCracken, 2015) that met all the inclusion criteria.…”

“…Finally, Olson and McCracken (2015) compared the effectiveness of either a fully asynchronous or a mixed asynchronous and synchronous course design. The sample consisted of undergraduate students, and the measures included course grades and satisfaction.…”

“…The middle of the 1990s witnessed the slow advent of Internet-based education and early applications of online distance learning (Alnabelsi et al, 2015). Since then, there has been a significant increase in the number of available e-learning resources and educational technologies (Ruiz et al, 2006;Gegenfurtner et al, 2019b;Testers et al, 2019), which have gained more importance in the higher education and professional training contexts (Wang and Hsu, 2008;Nelson, 2010;Siewiorek and Gegenfurtner, 2010;Stout et al, 2012;Knogler et al, 2013;McMahon-Howard and Reimers, 2013;Olson and McCracken, 2015;Testers et al, 2015;McKinney, 2017;Goe et al, 2018). To date, various possibilities regarding the implementation of e-learning in educational contexts exist, one of which is the use of webinars-a prototypical form of synchronous online courses.…”

Moving Beyond Smile Sheets: A Case Study on the Evaluation and Iterative Improvement of an Online Faculty Development Program

“…Supporting our theory, a participant in the teaching online seminar noted in the spring of 2014 that "not only do I feel happy and excited about my teaching as I exit eTOS, I feel a connection to many more professionals at BSU" (eTOS Spring, exit survey). Establishing a learning community takes time (Dzubinski, 2014); unfortunately, though, it does not always work as planned (Olson & McCracken, 2015). For instance, in the course design seminar, some faculty complained about using the discussion board as a place to "show and tell" their design documents-a strategy encouraged by some in the field (see Lowenthal & Thomas, 2010a).…”