Enhancing instructor credibility and immediacy in online multimedia designs

Abstract

The design of multimedia elements used in video for online courses can increase student perceptions of their instructor’s credibility and immediacy. Credibility is the learner’s perception of the subject matter expertise of the instructor, while immediacy is the learner’s perception of the instructor’s ability to communicate and reduce physiological distance. This experiment randomly assigned research participants (N = 211) into one of five independent treatment groups, each group viewed a different design based on the same subject matter, instructor video, audio narration, and presentation slides. These presentation designs included an instructor-only, slides-only, video-switching, dual-windows, and a superimposed-slides multimedia design variation. A series of 5 × 1 Analyses of variances and Tukey post hoc calculations were conducted to test for statistically significant differences between groups. The results suggest that a balance can be established between instructor credibility and immediacy by showing both the instructor and instructional content during online classes.