Abstract
The present study is the result of the research question: How do teachers promote immediacy through interaction with their students in online graduate courses? Research was carried out at Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican private university that offers online courses. The research methodology employed a qualitative approach of virtual ethnography, which entails non-participative observation and interviews with head professors and teaching assistants with the purpose of exploring the manner in which teachers foster immediacy in the discussion forums of online courses. The findings are organized into three main categories: instructional design, forms of communication and teaching strategies promoting immediacy, which show the manner in which teachers use immediacy when interacting with their students; immediacy that was also found in the administrative and academic forums of the online courses researched.
Highlights
Immediacy first appeared in the “face-to-face” educational modality. Mehrabian (1967a) defined it as the degree in which communication behaviors facilitate physical or psychological closeness in interpersonal communication. Gorham (1988) broadened this definition to include any verbal interaction that increased the psychological closeness between teachers and students
Bertrán, Callén and Pérez (2003) called ‘virtual ethnography’ an observation work performed through a computer screen, with the objective of showing how social life is organized, based on the interaction and communication facilitated by a computer
We identified the manner in which each head professor configured their discussion forum, and at the same time we tried to determine which forums had higher interaction between teachers and students and if expressions of closeness or interest from teachers toward students were present in the messages
Summary
Immediacy first appeared in the “face-to-face” educational modality. Mehrabian (1967a) defined it as the degree in which communication behaviors facilitate physical or psychological closeness in interpersonal communication. Gorham (1988) broadened this definition to include any verbal interaction that increased the psychological closeness between teachers and students. Gorham (1988) broadened this definition to include any verbal interaction that increased the psychological closeness between teachers and students. This concept includes communication behaviors reducing the perceived distance between people (Thweatt & McCroskey, 1996). In Latin America, distance education has been developing only since the last decade, and because of that, immediacy in this modality and educational context has not been a subject researched enough. This situation is why further in-depth research is needed on this topic
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