Cues of Caring: How Students Perceive That Faculty in Online Classes Do (or Don’t) Care

Caring has been an animating driver of the scholarship of teaching and learning and the founding of the Journal of Management Education 50 years ago. However, as business schools have moved quickly toward offering more online courses, researchers have not systematically explored the cues that students in online classes use to evaluate whether or not their instructors care. Drawing inspiration from Hawk and Lyons’ classic JME article on student perceptions of faculty caring in face-to-face classes, this study uses concept mapping to identify cues that students use to evaluate whether faculty do or do not care. Our findings suggest that students in online synchronous classes rely on many of the same interpersonal and attributional cues to infer that faculty care (e.g., responsiveness, personalization, faculty enthusiasm, and willingness to invest time) as students in face-to-face classes. In particular, we highlight a distinction between caring for students as people and caring for students’ learning outcomes. We also find, however, that the cues used to perceive that faculty don’t care are qualitatively different from those used to determine that faculty care. We discuss the implications of our findings for equipping management educators to communicate care to students in the 21st century.