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Category: Methods and Measures

Description: Although applied to numerous communication contexts, affordance approaches have yet to receive sustained attention in the instructional literature. The ongoing migration to online pedagogy suggests a need to examine the impact of technological affordances and communication in Learning Management Systems (LMS). To that end, an experimental study investigated the responses of undergraduate students to a course management page, in which the presence or absence of peer identity and the helper heuristic on evaluations of fellow students were manipulated. The results suggest that the helper heuristic – but not identity cues – positively impacted perceptions of source credibility, attractiveness, perceptions of an assignment-related message, and student rapport. These images represent what the respondents viewed in randomized conditions.