Limitations

Even though this study had results with implications for the online classroom, there are important limitations for consideration. Within this chapter, I explore limitations regarding the project’s participants, scope, data, and process.

Participants

This study examined thirteen participants and men and women did not participate equally (ten men versus three women). A study with more participants and equal participation between the genders would have the potential to generate results with external validity.

Because only thirteen students participated in this study, the findings are not generalizable since individual differences may account for the results. That is not to say that the implications in the discussion session are not worth noting, but that the results may not apply to a distinctly different CMC-based course and participant population.

What this case study does offer is rich insight into factors that require further exploration.

Another limitation was that I did not randomly select participants and I did not randomly assigned participants to either a control group or experimental group. All participants knew that they were a part of the study, and all students consented to participate. This knowledge of the research and participation in the inventories could have resulted in participant bias.

Scope

I designed this study to gather an in-depth look at each participant’s gender (biological and psychological) and style preferences (communication and learning styles). This scope allowed me to obtain information about each participant and have a comprehensive inquiry into his or her learning, self-reported and CMC styles, and the relationships between these style preferences. With that stated, there are still limitations regarding the data.

The analyzed CMC was narrow in scope. In the online classroom, participants knew each other’s identities. Participants knew the other participants by name, which did not allow for identity play. A participant could most likely guess another participant’s gender by his or her name, and therefore, could not likely hide his or her gender from other participants. I left the chat in Acrobat Connect Professional unanalyzed, but it was also possible in Connect for participants to appear by a webcam and/or use a microphone;

thus, their voices or visual image could have revealed their genders and other visual markers, such as age and race. In their CMC, some participants even indicated that they knew each other outside of the online classroom.

Another limitation to the CMC was that I analyzed only written communication in small group chat. Participants’ purpose during those small group chats was to complete their assigned coursework. This focus did not allow for much unstructured chatting time.

Instead, participants focused on the assignments. I quickly added the coding items

“answer to class questions” and “answer to class question with opinion” to the coding scheme because so many participant responses were answers. For this reason, the excess of student answers may have limited the opportunity to study unstructured and

naturally-occurring CMC.

Data

This study had data limitations. I only calculated mean scores of the inventories and then compared these scores to investigate relationships among the participants based on their biological genders and communication and learning style preferences. To perform this type of investigation, I self-sorted participants into groups to compare the mean scores. I also did not investigate whether any relationship was statistically significant.

Another limitation was the coding scheme and coding process. I was the only researcher to code the data. The CMC codes had the possibility of researcher bias since I made my own coding scheme and coded all the CMC by hand. However, this limitation could also extend to internal validity since I was the only researcher to code the CMC and a different researcher could have coded the CMC differently.

Process

The process for completing this study was extensive. Faced with various limitations throughout the research process, my thesis ultimately became a case study that emphasized exploration. However, my initial goal was to create an empirical project that investigated learning style, self-reported communication style, online communication style, in addition to biological and psychological gender. I found it imperative to explore these factors within the same cohesive project—discovering if online classrooms mirrored a democratic or a gendered society.

After I designed a project to gather rich data on the study’s participants, I realized that I needed to limit my scope to make the project manageable. In my original thesis proposal, I had two additional research questions: ¹⁵

Question 1. Do instructors’ self-reported communication styles relate to students’ communication styles in CMC-based online classrooms?

Question 2. Do instructors’ learning styles relate to student communication styles in CMC-based online classrooms?

I omitted these research questions to focus solely on student participants before I began any data collection.

Through the data collection process, I met my goal of gathering rich information on the study’s participants. I had actually gathered so much data that I again faced the decision to limit the project’s scope. I stated in my original thesis proposal that I would study both text-based and voice-based CMC in D2L and Acrobat Connect Professional. I decided to leave CMC that occurred within the software, Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, unanalyzed.¹⁶ I left CMC in Connect unanalyzed because the majority of

15 These are two research questions in addition to the four research questions that I proposed in the first chapter of the thesis.

16 Students participated in the online classroom through Connect prior to meeting in their small groups in D2L. Connect offered live online classrooms, allowing participants to communicate and collaborate instantly (Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2006). Participants had the potential of interacting in Connect through screen sharing, as well as through chats, white boards and embedded quizzes or surveys.

the CMC was student responses to the instructors’ presentations and activities. I decided that CMC in D2L fit the purposes of the project best since participants were communicating with each other in the small group chats without the constant presence from the course instructor.

My next step was data analysis. With my original goal of an empirical study, I first completed two-tailed Pearson correlations and analyses of variances with the data. I later omitted these findings from my thesis based on the study’s limitations, which included the small participant size, the unequal gender participation (ten men and three women), and the lack of a control group. These limitations, as previously discussed within this chapter, limited my ability to include statistical tests with significance. I had to refocus my project; I refocused on mean scores and general trends within the participant pool.¹⁷ My project shifted from a quantitative empirical study to a qualitative case study.

I have learned through this process that my initial goal was too large for an empirical research project. On one hand, investigating all factors within the same project allowed me to gather detailed information. No one project had investigated all the factors that I studied and the case study approach allowed for this preliminary exploration.¹⁸ On the other hand, this detailed information only related to thirteen participants and an empirical project requires more student participation to have results with generalizability.

17 I also discussed limitations regarding data within this chapter.

18 To the best of my knowledge, no one study has investigated biological gender, psychological gender, actual CMC, and self-reported communication and learning styles within the same project.

My initial goal to investigate all factors within the same project made for a comprehensive case study with interesting results. Nonetheless, this goal also made for an intense research process. This project offers important information regarding the relationships between biological gender, psychological gender, actual CMC, and self-reported communication and learning styles—and these relationships have implications for the online classroom that require further research, both quantitative and qualitative.