Re‐thinking instructional immediacy for web courses: A social cognitive exploration

Abstract

The growth of the World‐Wide Web of as a medium of instruction in higher education rekindles an old debate about the effectiveness of instructional technology. The present limitations of the Internet medium restrict the teacher immediacy of Web courses and possibly have a negative impact on both affective and cognitive learning. Web courses also appear to be a deficient means to form close relationships between students, which was termed student immediacy. But Web courses also have the potential to be more immediate than conventional classroom instruction by introducing a new “agency”; into the learning environment, the computer. Learner interactions with computers potentially convey a sense of personal tutorship or computer immediacy that augment immediacy in comparison to the limited large group interaction prevalent in conventional lecture sections. Social cognitive theory was applied to develop a unified construct of instructional immediacy that encompassed teacher, student and computer agency. Within this theory, immediacy behaviors provide social and status incentives that motivate learning. An exploratory qualitative ethnographic content analysis of three Web courses identified potential indicators of immediacy in Web classrooms and framed recommendations about future research on instructional immediacy and Web course design.