The impact of instructor immediacy behaviors on student retention and self-reported class success in online classes

Community college students taking online courses often struggle with learning the material on their own, compared to a traditional classroom where they meet with an instructor regularly. It is more difficult to build rapport with the instructor and with classmates in an online course, which can cause feelings of isolation. Although there are more students enrolling in online courses each year, fewer of them are persisting in their online courses compared to those taking traditional courses. Part of the problem is that instructors are often not trained in best practices for online teaching. Teaching online courses requires different strategies than teaching traditional courses. Online teaching is not as simple as recording lectures from a traditional class and posting them for the students to view. Purposeful, planned efforts must be made to connect with online students as they are not lingering in the classroom before or after class to converse with the instructor. They are not sitting in front of the instructor during lecture, where the instructor can pick up on their non-verbal communication and see that they don’t understand the material being presented, or that they have not had enough sleep, aren’t feeling well, etc. Online instruction involves designing an entire semester course in the weeks before the course begins. However, the job does not stop when the content has been loaded, tests have been created, and due dates have been set. The instructor then must have a plan for communicating and connecting regularly with students, making them feel as if they are a part of the class and letting them know that the instructor is available and open to communication when a student needs help. Instructors have a major influence on the students’ online course experience and can often impact whether or not a student remains in the course and is successful in the course. Instructor immediacy behaviors can impact student retention and self-reported class success in the online classroom. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between instructor immediacy behaviors and student retention, and instructor immediacy behaviors and self reported class success in online courses. The purpose was to determine specifically if five specific immediacy behaviors influenced students’ decision to remain in their online course, and if they influenced student-perceived success in the class. This study utilized a mixed methods explanatory sequential design. An online survey was used to collect information from students on their previous online course experience after the semester had ended. Interview questions were informed by the quantitative survey results, and 12 interviews were conducted to gather more in-depth information from participants about their online course experience. Descriptive statistics were used in analyzing and organizing the survey data. The qualitative portion of this study was conducted through the lens of social constructivism. Interviews were transcribed and then coded by recurring themes. Trustworthiness was ensured through recording and transcribing the interviews, member checking, and memoing. The results of this study revealed that that the majority of participants agreed or strongly agreed that each of the immediacy behaviors did positively contribute to their retention and success in their online classes. The recommendations generated from this study include that higher education institutions should invest in online-specific instructor training to include best practices for new and existing online faculty, instructors should create a schedule with a timetable for communicating with students throughout the semester, and instructors should experiment with a variety of immediacy behaviors in their online classes and use the most impactful ones. Future research should include conducting a similar study on a larger scale, along with more studies that examine instructor immediacy behaviors in online courses. In addition, researchers should continue to examine best practices for both the frequency and preferred types of communication in the online environment. Finally, increasing our understanding of what motivates students to remain in online courses they perceive to be substandard, as this could be used as a predictor in determining which students would be most successful in online courses. Expanding institutional offerings to include more pedagogical training specific to online instruction will have an impact on student success and retention, as even the smallest amounts of training in best practices for online instruction can have a significant influence on students. All of these combined efforts can be utilized to improve student success and retention in online courses, which will improve overall success and retention for institutions, and will impact the growing number of students who take online courses now and in the future.

Embargo status: Restricted until 09/2027. To request the author grant access, click on the PDF link to the left.