TY - JOUR TI - Can video feedback help improve student performance in online discussion boards? DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3HH6P48 PY - 2017 AB - Asynchronous online classes have not only enabled students to learn at a time and place of their convenience, they have also enabled academic institutions to reach more students than ever before. In exchange for such flexibility however, online students and instructors usually forgo the opportunity to meet face-to-face. As a consequence, asynchronous online classes can be inherently isolating. One possible remedy to this situation is engaging feedback provided by instructors. Indeed, some instructors have attempted to connect with their online students via video technology (Borup et al, 2014, 2015; Giffiths & Graham, 2010). Video strategies remain a relatively new alternative for online courses however, and several issues have yet to be fully addressed. The study presented in these pages sought to investigate if a video feedback strategy could be designed that would enable busy instructors to connect with their online students, and busy students to improve the academic quality of their contributions to online discussion board conversations. This was done by reviewing 3,046 posts, submitted by 116 students enrolled in 14 fully online courses. The review focused on both the educational quality of the posts, as well as the extent of threading within the discussion boards as a whole. Six of the fourteen online courses supplemented their discussion boards with a video feedback strategy, while the remaining eight did not. The results of this study suggest that the students who did receive video feedback from their instructors ended up contributing discussion posts that were higher in educational quality. These students also participated in a greater level of discussions threading than their peers who did not receive video feedback. KW - Design of Learning Contexts KW - Distance education KW - Web-based instruction LA - eng ER -