Mandarin Students' Perceptions of Multimodal Interaction in a Web Conferencing Environment: A Satisfaction Survey

A major indicator of whether online courses have been effective and successful is student satisfaction. Copious research points to lack of interaction as the most cited reason for student dissatisfaction. To improve this problem, new Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) technology could be considered as an option to enhance the online learning platform because it can provide much more varied multimodal communication channels such as audio, video, text chat, images, graphic tools, and pre-programmed emoticons. To understand the quality of interaction in such an online learning environment, a 40-item questionnaire survey of student satisfaction was undertaken to gauge distance students' perceptions of the ways they interacted online with their teachers through multimodal communication channels. It was subsequently found that interactions through modal resources such as voice, video, image-enhanced texts, and graphics were perceived as important; and this aspect of online learning was also rated as satisfactory. Thus the present study should be seen as adding to the understanding of which communication channels are perceived to contribute to multimodal interaction in terms of student satisfaction, thereby making it a worthwhile contribution to research knowledge about student satisfaction of multimodal interaction in a web conferencing environment. [For full proceedings, see ED564162.]