Abstract
This study investigated the effects of the changes in the image and voice of instructors in online video courses on online learner's learning achievement, social presence, learning satisfaction, and academic emotion. Two simultaneous online experiments were conducted with 122 college students in the image experiment, where the course videos varied in terms of the instructor's image (original image, face-beautified image, virtual image, and no image), and 93 college students in the voice experiment, where the course videos varied in terms of the instructor's voice (original voice, mutated voice, computer-synthesized voice). The results showed that learners viewing videos without instructor images had better learning achievements and less academic boredom relative to those who viewed videos with instructor images. However, the real instructor images were able to promote learners' learning satisfaction of instructor-student interaction more than no image and virtual image and promote satisfaction of instructor teaching more than virtual image. Meanwhile, learners' evaluation of the real instructor images was better than that of the virtual instructor image, and their evaluation of the face-beautified instructor image was better than the original image. Moreover, learners evaluated real instructor voices better than the computer-synthesized voice. In addition, the linear regression analysis revealed that the evaluations of both instructor's image and voice had a positive relationship with learners' social presence, learning satisfaction, and enjoyment, whereas they had a negative relationship with learner's boredom. And the evaluation of the instructor's image positively predicted student's transfer learning achievement. Thus, we suggested that the way of instructor presence should be well-designed and integrated with the course's instructional design and image and voice processing technology can be applied to assist online video course development.
Highlights
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, online education has been strongly promoted worldwide, as it provides highly convenient, flexible, and commonly shared online resources for students
We examined the relationship between learner’s evaluation of different ways of instructor image and voice and their learning achievement, social presence, learning satisfaction, and achievement-related emotion
This study investigated the effects of the changes in the image and voice of instructors in online video courses on online learning
Summary
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, online education has been strongly promoted worldwide, as it provides highly convenient, flexible, and commonly shared online resources for students. In a survey conducted by the Chinese Ministry of Education (2020), as of May 8, 2020, there were 1,454 universities in China conducting online learning, 1.03 million teachers have offered 1.07 million online courses, and a total of 17.75 million college students have participated in online learning. Researchers have carried out a lot of research and discussion around how to produce higher-quality video courses and improve the effectiveness of online education. Among these studies, whether instructors should present and how to present in the online courses is a crucial issue in the field of both research and social practice. The image and voice of instructors in online courses are key elements that must be considered in video course design
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