PRESENTING IN THE PRESENT: PUBLIC SPEAKING IN ONLINE COURSES

Abstract

During the 21st century, colleges have increasingly leveraged online-based courses as a means of instruction, and although public speaking ability is among employers’ most in-demand skills for college graduates, there exists a scarcity of research measuring students’ public speaking skill development in online courses. Even fewer studies measure public speaking skill development in online courses compared to the same skill development in classroom-based versions of the same courses taught by the same instructors. Given this background, the current study used analysis of variance with repeated measures to determine whether face-to-face Business Communication students’ presentation skills improved more than, less than, or the same as those of online Business Communication students. This design enabled measurement of the dependent variable of presentation skill improvement, in groups of students separated by the independent variable of course delivery format—classroom or online—over time. This design also allowed the researcher to control for the variable of instructor; instructor bias was controlled for by only comparing students enrolled with, and therefore taught and evaluated by, the same instructor in both modalities. Furthermore, to uncover additional findings related to student choice of and success in online courses, two more sets of analyses were conducted. The first computed change scores between the repeated-measures tests for each of the eight assessment criteria, as well as the total across the eight criteria, and correlated these change scores with other student data where this analysis was appropriate (for example, with SAT/ACT scores). The second set of analyses added blocking variables—sex, race, and other background data—to the analysis of variance with repeated measures. Evident from these analyses was that the rate at which public speaking sub-skills developed over the ten-week period between repeated-measures assessments was not uniform. Changes in performance varied by assessment criterion, course modality, and student background. Online student performance tended to improve at a marginally greater rate in assessments of Body Language and tended to diminish at a marginally lesser rate in assessments of Quality & Quantity of Information, whereas face-to-face student performance improved at a significantly greater rate in assessments of Audience & Team Engagement. In this latter criterion, the performance of online male students decreased somewhat, whereas the other subgroups—per sex and course modality—showed essentially no difference in the rate of improvement from pre-test to post-test. Additional findings suggested that online students tended to work more employment hours than classroom-based students and that, regardless of course modality, the higher the education level a student’s parents have attained, the more likely the student was to make learning gains in the course.