Adopting Web Conferencing in Online Teaching: A Perspective From Logistic Regression

Background

Traditional online instruction has been mostly asynchronous with learning and communication between instructors and students supported by discussion forums, emails, blogs, wikis, or text-based and pre-recorded video lectures (Huang & Hsiao, 2012; Ruiz et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2004). Though offering distance learners the flexibility of learning at their own pace, the asynchronous model has such disadvantages and problems as lack of real-time interaction and collaboration, no opportunities for asking questions and getting instant feedback, causing sense of separation between instructors and students, and low student motivation and participation (Bower, 2011; Dumford & Miller, 2018; Gazan, 2020). Web-conferencing helps address these disadvantages and problems by transforming online learning into a synchronous, virtual classroom where the interaction and the sense of connectedness can be comparable to a face-to-face classroom (Beattie et al., 2017; Islam, 2019).