Characteristics of
students in online courses differ in unexpected ways
Can students learn to speak in public from online
courses? This topic has
been hotly debated within the communication discipline, and, for the
most part, evidence for one side of the debate or the other has been
mostly based on personal experiences, rather than
systematically-collected data. Now,
some of this systematically collected data has been published, in the
April 2001 issue of Communication Education.
Ruth Anne Clark, a professor of speech
communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and
David Jones, chair of fine and applied arts at Parkland College,
collected information from students enrolled in traditional and online
sections of public speaking courses at a community college in the
Midwestern U.S. They wanted
to see if there were differences in the personal characteristics of the
students who enrolled in the online vs. the traditional sections,
whether there were differences in the perceived apprehension about
public speaking or perceived differences in the students’ assessments
of their own speaking abilities. They
also wanted to see if there were actual differences in the quality of
the student speeches at the end of the course.
The student participants in the study were enrolled
in either an eight-week online section of a basic public speaking
course, or they were enrolled in an eight-week traditional section of
public speaking. Both types
of courses began and ended at the same time, and each instructor taught
both a traditional and an online section of the course.
The instructors used the same assignments and the same textbook
for all sections of the course.
The online students completed assignments according
to a calendar. They
prepared and delivered public speeches to audiences that they located,
and they submitted videotapes of their speeches for instructor feedback
and grade. They submitted their examinations via first-class mail.
They communicated with their instructors via e-mail or in chat
rooms. The students in the
traditional section attended class sessions, heard instructor lectures
and completed written assignments, took exams in class, and prepared and
delivered speeches for their classmates.
Both groups of students gathered for the presentation of their
final speeches on the last scheduled day of the course. Both groups also gathered face-to-face at the beginning of
the course.
At the beginning of the course, the researchers
asked all students to complete a questionnaire about their personal
characteristics and their reasons for taking the course in the format
they had chosen. They also
asked the students to complete a measure of their apprehension about
speaking and a measure of their perceptions of their own public speaking
abilities. At the end of
the course, the researchers asked all students to complete the same
measures of apprehension of estimate of their speaking abilities.
They also videotaped all final speeches, and two trained
individuals who had previously not been connected with the study rated
these speeches without knowing that the purpose of the study was to
assess differences between online and traditional methods of
instruction.
There were no differences, either before or after
the course, between the students’ ratings of their apprehension about
speaking or their assessments of their own speaking abilities. And, there were no differences in the raters’ evaluations
of the students’ final speeches.
There were, however, differences in the personal characteristics
of the students enrolled in the traditional and online sections of the
course.
Students enrolled in the online sections were more
likely to be male, to be experienced in college-level work, and to have
taken an online course previously.
They also worked more hours per week than the students in the
traditional sections, and they valued the aspect of the course that
required fewer days of on-campus attendance.
More of the online students had easy access to a computer, and
they regarded themselves as better at undertaking independent work than
did the students enrolled in the traditional courses.
They also saw as less important the ability to interact regularly
with peers in the course and to give their speeches in front of a group
of people with whom they were familiar.
There were some potentially important factors where
the online and traditional students were not different, however.
Students in the online and traditional sections did not differ in
age, how far from campus they resided or whether they had children
living at home. They also
did not differ in how much they enjoyed using the computer or in their
frequency of e-mail use. Both
groups rated getting to know the course instructor as being very
important to the course experience.
The online group, however, suffered greater attrition in course
enrollment than did the group in the traditional sections.
The researchers concluded that there were no
differences in performance between traditional and online students, but
there were different reasons why individual students sought out the
format for the course that they had chosen.
They cautioned that their results were based on relatively small
numbers of students and that the instructors were enthusiastic about
teaching in both the traditional and online formats, but they indicated
that continuing to work on effective online formats for public speaking
courses would be likely to be beneficial to some categories of students.
Clark, R.A., & Jones, D. (2001).
A comparison of traditional and online formats in a public
speaking course. Communication
Education, 50, 109-124.
Reported by
Bill Eadie, NCA Associate Director.