Facebook in the classroom: the effects of immediacy on students' perceptions of instructor credibility, referent power, and likability

Instructor immediacy has a direct positive association with students’ perceptions of instructor credibility, referent power, and likability in the classroom. These same variables are associated with increased affective learning. In addition, students prefer technology-enhanced communication. Based on this information, this study tested the hypothesis that different levels of computer-mediated immediacy (i.e., high, low, and none) would be associated with differences in perceived instructor credibility, perceived instructor referent power, and perceived instructor likability. Participants (N = 144) were drawn from three discussion sections of a lower division public speaking course from a university located in the Western United States. Data were collected over the course of one fall and one spring semester, consecutively. Teacher immediacy on Facebook was manipulated in two experimental groups, high immediacy and low immediacy, with a third group serving as a control. One-month after exposure to the Facebook pages, students in all three groups completed a questionnaire containing several self-report measures. Results indicate that contrary to what was predicted, different levels of immediacy communicated through Facebook had no impact on students’ perceptions of instructor immediacy, nor did it impact perceptions of instructor credibility, referent power, or likability. The results of this study suggest that instructors should maintain their focus on demonstrating immediacy in the classroom because in this study, adding Facebook to the face-to-face classroom environment to increase perceptions of instructor immediacy had no significant impact. Students across the three groups perceived the instructor as highly immediate, suggesting that the communication of immediacy that occurs in the classroom environment might wash out any potential benefits of immediacy communicated via social media.