Exploring students’ perceptions of identity and helper heuristics in the online classroom discussion board

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. 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. Findings are discussed in terms of both theoretical and instructional relevance.