Student Voices on the Roles of Instructors in Asynchronous Learning Environments in the 21st Century

Abstract

This paper determines which instructional roles and outputs are important in the 21 st century from the perspective of students in asynchronous learning environments. This research work uses a literature review, in-depth interviews with experts, and a pilot study with students to define the instructors' outputs. Following this, roles are determined by using a quantitative methodology (in a sample of 925 students). To our knowledge, the remaining research works on this topic identify the online instructors' roles by a qualitative analysis. The findings suggest that a new role, the life skill promoter, has emerged. Furthermore, analysis of the remaining roles (pedagogical, designer, social, technical and managerial) showed that: (i) online instructors are, first and foremost, pedagogues; (ii) the design of the particular online program influences the pedagogical and designer roles and; (iii) the managerial role has declined in importance over the years due to the development of more intuitive and transparent online scenarios from the beginning of the course onward.

Factors Influencing Interaction in an Online English Course in Vietnam

“…Concerning the usefulness of the instructors' feedback, the analysis of focus group interview data reveals that the learners of this course valued the instructors' messages. This finding matches those observed in other studies (Ghadirian et al, 2017;Gómez-Rey et al, 2017) which showed that learners participated more if instructors' posts were of high quality and usefulness. In this study, however, the majority of instructors' messages, interestingly, aimed to inform the learners about their study progress, to respond to technical questions and remind students about undone exercises.…”

“…In this study, the majority of learners also placed a high level of importance on the regularity of instructors' online presence. These findings seem to be consistent with other research which found that the instructors' teaching presence plays a crucial role in pedagogical instruction, using different types of interactional matrices (Cox et al, 2015;Gómez-Rey, 2017). However, the instructors themselves had different levels of online presence: some were online only twice a week.…”

“…Their understanding about, commitment to, active participation in and attitudes about online learning are some of the key factors (Cho & Tobias, 2016;Palloff & Pratt, 2011). Other factors include their shift in pedagogy (from traditional to online teaching), timely response and individual, group feedback to learners' queries, learner engagement (Cox, Black, Heney Keith, 2015;Cho & Tobias, 2016;Gómez-Rey, Barbera & Fernández-Navarro, 2017). Successful online instructors should connect their learners together, especially with native speakers or excellent speakers of the language they are studying so as to increase learners' motivation (Wu, Yen & Marek, 2011).…”

How an online tutor motivates E-learning English

“…Furthermore, online tutor's role fulfills several functions like: a) academic: relating to mastery of contents, activities and student formative assessment, b) technical: mastery over available tools on the virtual environment, c) guiding: plan, structure and establish operating rules, d) social: meant to overcome feelings of isolation, loss or lack of motivation of students participating in this educational mode, and e) organizational: providing students guidance and advice on organizational matters in the course of the formative actions ( Gómez-Rey et al., 2017 ; Gulbahar and Kalelioglu, 2015 ; Klimova and Poulova, 2011 ; Krasnova and Demeshko, 2015 ).…”

What is the Better Social Media for Mathematics Learning? A Case Study at A Rural School in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

“…Information technology has facilitated a variety of new learning approaches that allow students to develop naturally driven by their own interests (Fidaldo & Thormann, 2017;Gómez-rey et al, 2017;Yadegaridehkordi et al, 2015). They can find a wide range of knowledge through independent thinking and real-world experience.…”