In our previous online courses, students mentioned not feeling connected to the instructor and the course itself. Research questions included 1) how do students perceive weekly instructor created informational videos and 2) how do these videos impact student engagement and connectedness in online asynchronous business administration courses?

“Online education consists of a set of teaching and learning modalities that are carried out remotely, based on forms of communication mediated by synchronous and asynchronous technologies” ([4]). This study focuses on asynchronous formats where students learn independently within structured timeframes. Key challenges in such settings include sustaining engagement, reducing isolation, and improving student performance ([11]).

In this study, connectedness refers to students’ affective sense of belonging, relational trust, and perceived social presence within the course, particularly their felt relationship with the instructor and the learning environment. Connectedness is widely recognized as a key contributor to motivation, persistence, and learning satisfaction in online education ([6]; [14]). Engagement, by contrast, reflects students’ behavioral, cognitive, and functional involvement in course activities, including interaction with course materials, clarity of task completion, and sustained academic effort. Engagement is foundational to student success in online asynchronous environments, where self-regulation and active course participation are essential ([11]; [7]). These constructs collectively inform how students navigate both the emotional and operational dimensions of online coursework.

This study draws on the Community of Inquiry (Col) framework ([8]), which emphasizes the interplay of teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence in creating meaningful online learning experiences. Instructor-created videos directly contribute to teaching and social presence by humanizing communication and reinforcing structure. Within SoTL, connectedness describes the extent to which students feel a sense of belonging, relational trust, and meaningful engagement with their instructor, peers, and course structure; an affective dimension that influences motivation, persistence, and overall learning experience ([6]). As such, instructors created brief two-to-five-minute videos that provided guidance on upcoming assignments, clarified due dates, shared informational updates, highlighted relevant campus activities, and offered additional context or reminders to support students in navigating course expectations.

Prior studies affirm that instructor-created videos can increase student engagement, motivation, and retention, while mitigating feelings of isolation ([10]; [13]; [12]). Videos that include visible instructor presence foster stronger student engagement ([15]). Additionally, when students perceive relational warmth and approachability in instructors, learning satisfaction improves. Lastly, instructor-created videos have shown to increase instructor social presence and create classroom connectedness ([3]; [9]).

One of the 10 themes of exemplary teaching identified ([2]) was a socioemotional connection between the students and the instructor. When students feel like they have a connection with faculty/staff, their educational experiences have positive outcomes for the students, the educators, and the institution ([14]).

Student engagement has always been a challenge in higher education, especially in online asynchronous courses ([7]). In addition to engagement, students may struggle with connectedness to a course/instructor in online asynchronous courses. Goals of this study are to determine students’ perceptions whether a brief weekly video created by the instructor briefly explaining assignments and other class information increased students’ overall engagement, connectedness, experience, learning, performance, satisfaction, and motivation in an online asynchronous course.

As students enter higher education after their high school COVID learning experiences, their expectations and norms have changed. It is our assumption, based on experience, that online students perceive deadlines as guidelines, rather than hard due dates. Research indicates that one expectation of students that has changed is that deadlines will be extended. Some faculty felt students wanted more engagement and short visual information ([5]). We believe that video engagement will clarify this misperception.

Even post-COVID, learning continues to be a social experience and students want to be engaged and want to understand why course content/degree is relevant.

With online education, “new technologies enable faculty to ‘see’ student learning and thinking in ways that we could not before” ([1]).

Participants were undergraduate students enrolled in three upper-level business administration courses (N = 52) at a small public university in the Midwest offering both campus and online programs. Courses ran for 16 weeks and were delivered asynchronously. Students voluntarily completed an anonymous online survey near the end of the semester. Across the three courses, a total of 113 students were enrolled. With 52 students completing the voluntary end-of-semester survey, the study achieved a 46% response rate, which is consistent with, or above typical rates reported in online higher education research. The weekly videos were typically 2 - 5 minutes in length, delivered in a talking-head format recorded via webcam, and distributed to students through the Learning Management System’s weekly announcement feature.

The survey items were intentionally selected to align with the study’s SoTL-driven focus on understanding how weekly instructor-created videos influence student engagement and connectedness in asynchronous courses. The ten Likert-scale items were adapted from ([11]) to maintain conceptual consistency with established measures of online engagement and were reviewed by two faculty colleagues to ensure clarity, relevance, and content validity. Five items were designed to assess engagement, such as understanding assignments, staying on task, and interacting with course materials, because engagement is a central determinant of student success in asynchronous learning environments. The remaining five items measured connectedness, an affective dimension related to students’ sense of belonging, instructor presence, and relational trust, which SoTL literature highlights as essential to motivation, satisfaction, and persistence in online learning. These matter because they provide insight into both functional and emotional dimensions of learning: how students perceive logistical clarity and structural support (function), and how they experience relational and social aspects of the course (connectedness). Collectively, the item structure allowed the study to capture nuanced student perceptions regarding whether weekly videos helped reduce ambiguity, humanize the online environment, and foster a meaningful learning experience, which are key outcomes aligned with the overarching research questions.

The following five questions focus on students’ sense of belonging, relational rapport, and feelings of being connected to the instructor or course community: Q1: The weekly videos made me feel connected to this course. Q2: The weekly videos helped me feel connected to the instructor. Q4: The weekly videos contributed to course discussions. Q5: The weekly videos helped me engage with the instructor. Q10: The weekly videos helped me feel part of a community. The authors related Connectedness with relational, emotional, and social presence.

The following five questions focus on student involvement, clarity, task completion, interaction with materials, and functional engagement with the course: Q3: The weekly videos increased my engagement with the course. Q6: The weekly videos helped me engage with the course materials. Q7: The weekly videos clearly communicated assignment deadlines. Q8: The weekly videos helped me understand assignments. Q9: The weekly videos helped me stay on task. The authors related Engagement with the behavioral, cognitive, and functional aspects of course participation.

The study was approved as exempt by the University’s Institutional Review Board. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze mean responses and standard deviations for each survey item.

The inquiry aimed to understand student perceptions of weekly instructor-created videos and their impact on student engagement and connectedness in online asynchronous business administration courses. The online survey consisted of ten rating questions exploring the impacts of weekly instructor created information videos. Students responded to rating survey questions using a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly agree; 2 = agree; 3 = neutral; 4 = disagree; 5 = strongly disagree); Using this rating scale students responded to the impact each of the following: course engagement and course connectedness (Table 1).

Table1. Mean scores.

Based on 52 student responses, the following key findings emerged:

Future research could explore how different types of video content (e.g., informational, motivational, feedback-based, or discussion-driven) influence distinct aspects of engagement such as cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components. A second study might incorporate video elements that encourage peer interaction, such as student responses to video prompts or collaborative video projects.

Additionally, applying this research to other disciplines outside of business could assess whether video engagement translates across content types. Research could also examine the effect of video length, format (talking head vs. screen recording), or accessibility features (closed captions, transcripts) on engagement and learning outcomes.

This study reaffirmed the importance of instructor presence in online learning and highlighted how even small changes, like weekly videos, can substantially shift student perceptions. One concrete action for the next academic year will be to embed brief, personalized weekly videos in all asynchronous courses, focusing not only on logistical updates but also on encouragement, check-ins, and relevance to real-world applications.

Key takeaways include the following: Instructor visibility matters. Students feel more connected when they see and hear from their instructor regularly. Videos help reduce ambiguity and increase structure, which supports self-regulated learning. Community-building, beyond instructor to student relationship building, remains a challenge in asynchronous formats and deserves targeted strategies beyond instructor-created content.