Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 96

Internet Learning Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 – Spring 2015
Researchers have affirmed teacher immediacy effectiveness in online classrooms
(Arbaugh, 2001; Conaway, Easton, & Schmidt, 2005; Dahl, 2004). When operationalized
for this study in terms of the online classroom teacher, immediacy includes two categories:
instructor-initiated personalized communications that are particularly considerate of student
feelings and build psychological closeness and instructor timely online responses. In a
general application of immediacy, Mehrabian (2007) said, “Immediacy or closeness in an
interaction between two persons (or between an individual and an object) involves greater
physical proximity and/or increasing perceptual availability of two persons (or an object to a
person)” (p. 180). Thus, words like closeness, feelings, and proximity, can be viewed as
scholarly terms that best operationalize immediacy.
Terms such as emotions or emotional cues according to Jones and Wirtz (2006) are
also related to immediacy. “Two such message features, verbal person centeredness (PC)
and nonverbal immediacy (NI), have consistently been found to be particularly beneficial in
bringing about emotional change” (p. 217).
Griggs et al. (2004) conducted research to investigate whether instruction in
introductory psychology communicated the advice of the scholarly community. By
examining and applying the results of the Griggs et al. research to the practice of online
education, the study included establishing a benchmark for the frequency of teacher
immediacy citation. Griggs et al. noted, “It is not unreasonable for teachers to expect that
introductory texts would present the basic common core concepts of psychology as well as
cite a common set of classic studies and books” (p. 115). The focus of the study to follow
did not include immediacy in introductory psychology. Instead, the focus included
immediacy terminology usage in online education textbooks, the extent to which the
textbooks cite scholarly studies, and whether consistency exists in nomenclature choice for
chapter headings.
Underlying the degree to which textbooks include acknowledgment of the scholarly
community is a debate about the authors of the textbooks: Marshak and DeGroot (1978)
argued that people with practical experience in the field do not necessarily write textbooks.
Coppola et al. (2002) contended that online instructors learn by doing. Moore (1993)
observed that “instruction is no longer an individual’s work, but the work of teams of
specialists—media specialists, knowledge specialists, instruction design specialists and
learning specialists” (as cited in Laidlaw et al., 2003, p. 182).
Based on the compendium by Griggs et al. (2004), an absence of teacher immediacy
discussion or an absence of scholarly references pertinent to immediacy in the online
educational textbooks would indicate that the books are idiosyncratic, but only in
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