The Human Element

One of the affordances of instructional videos in online courses is that they provide the opportunity for faculty to increase their instructor presence in asynchronous learning environments. This chapter draws upon qualitative interview data collected from student perspectives about their experiences with online course media, and discusses emergent themes from student interviews related to increased instructor presence such as trustworthiness (social context, branding, production values, nonverbal communication), personalization (humor, colloquial language), and feedback. That is, videos that encompassed these qualities were evaluated and discussed in ways that reflected more social presence (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2014) and instructor immediacy (Baker, 2010), and less social distance (Magee & Smith, 2013). Our findings suggest that online instructional videos can be an effective tool to reduce social distance between instructors and students. This chapter concludes with suggestions for online education practitioners on how to produce and use instructional videos to increase instructor presence and immediacy.