Emotions and Student Roles in an Online Course

Abstract

A study examining an online graduate-level course for evidence of distributed emotion yielded many findings, including emotion being socially distributed. In particular, it was found that many students played distinct and constant emotional roles which impacted all class members. These roles fall into the following categories: cognitive task-based, perspective-based, emotion-based, or a combination. The implications of this finding include the effect that distributed emotion has on collaborative online work groups and the lessening of the emotional load often felt by online instructors as distributed emotion is taken into account.