Student Voices on the Roles of Instructors in Asynchronous Learning Environments in the 21st Century

This paper determines which instructional roles and outputs are important in the 21st century from the perspective of students in asynchronous learning environments. This research work uses a literature review, in-depth interviews with experts, and a pilot study with students to define the instructors’ outputs. Following this, roles are determined by using a quantitative methodology (in a sample of 925 students). To our knowledge, the remaining research works on this topic identify the online instructors' roles by a qualitative analysis. The findings suggest that a new role, the life skill promoter, has emerged. Furthermore, analysis of the remaining roles (pedagogical, designer, social, technical and managerial) showed that: (i) online instructors are, first and foremost, pedagogues; (ii) the design of the particular online program influences the pedagogical and designer roles and; (iii) the managerial role has declined in importance over the years due to the development of more intuitive and transparent online scenarios from the beginning of the course onward.


Introduction
The post-2015 education agenda encourages debate about the future development of education worldwide, with the goal of improving the quality of education. Enhancing the quality of education requires monitoring the existing quality of education in a wide range of areas, including the quality of the online learning experience (Gómez-Rey,  or the students' satisfaction with the course (Kuo, Walker, Belland, & Schroder, 2013). In particular, this study focuses on determining which instructional roles are important in the 21 st century from the perspective of students in asynchronous learning environments. Traditionally, instructors' roles have been defined using a qualitative approach in which they are defined in a first stage and then operationalized in a second stage (i.e., a top-down approach). Furthermore, the instructors' roles vary depending on the context (e.g., primary, secondary, postsecondary), content (e.g., science, literature, history), and course goals (e.g., mastery of content, acquisition of skills, problem solving). These two facts impedes reaching consensus in the number of roles that instructors should have when teaching. This paper uses a set of instructors' roles that were identified after an extensive literature review, indepth interviews with experts in the field, and a pilot study which analysed students' perceptions.
Furthermore, unlike state-of-the-art studies in which instructors' roles are defined a priori using qualitative approaches, identification of instructors' roles in this study was completed using statistical models (exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis). Using this approach also enables us to define the existing relationships/correlations among the roles identified. Finally, it is worth noting that this study uses students' perceptions as the main data source, as such perceptions are at the core of the new learning paradigms (Schweisfurth, 2015). The validity of assessing instructors using students' perceptions has been studied since the late 20th century (Millman & Darling-Hammond, 1989).

Literature Review
Since 1994, online instructor roles, competencies, and outputs have been studied first in distance education scenarios and second in online education environments. For purposes of this study, a role is defined as "a major function which is performed by individuals in a specific field or profession," a competency is defined as "an area of knowledge or skills which is critical to the production of key outputs," and an output is defined as "a product, service, condition, and/or information which results from performing a specific role" (Thach & Murphy, 1995, p. 58). Thach and Murphy (1995) was an early study that analysed instructors' roles in distance education in which the authors identified 11 online instructor roles ( Figure 1) and 10 competencies, including interpersonal communication, planning skills, collaboration/teamwork skills, among others. Experts were in charge of determining these roles, competencies, and outputs through a Delphi study and, finally, a ranking of these roles was also provided, based on the experts' ratings. In subsequent years, Williams (2003) extended the previously mentioned study and added two new emerging instructors' roles to the 11 proposed by Thach and Murphy (1995). These two new roles were the leader/change agent (as distinct from the administrative manager) and trainer. Thach and Murphy (1995) and Williams' (2003) studies adopted the same methodological and reiterated the importance of interpersonal communication and interaction between instructor and learners, thereby emphasizing their influence on the evolution of distance education. Taking a different perspective, Berge (1995a) developed an educational framework (based on a review of the literature) for the roles of a computer conference moderator in distance education based on the following four pillars: pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical. This framework has been extensively adopted in numerous studies, thus reinforcing its potential and importance (Abdulla, 2004;Liu, Bonk, Magjuka, Lee, & Su, 2005).
In recent years, the topic has also been discussed in the distance education literature to analyse whether recent changes in society and education have or have not influenced instructors' roles. For instance, Bezuidenhout (2015) analysed the roles of distance educators' that may impact their perceived workloads. Four main pillars of an academic job were identified in this study: (1)  In line with the two previously described papers (Thach & Murphy, 1995;Williams, 2003), Goodyear et al. (2001) also studied how experts evaluated the instructors' outputs. They identified 8 roles, different outputs associated with each role, and 23 competencies. Abdullah's PhD thesis later studied the same research topic (roles, competencies and outputs) (Abdulla, 2004) and proposed a new approach to ranking instructors' roles. Abdulla was concerned that there were as yet no studies in which the instructors' roles were analysed using students' perceptions. Motivated by this research gap, Abdulla (2004) extended Thach & Murphy (1995) work using students' perceptions and by adopting Berge's role-based educational model (Berge, 1995a).
Recently, the topic has also been analysed in online scenarios. For instance, the work of Carril et al. peripheral roles (such as social, evaluative, managerial, technological, counselling, personal, and research). The sample was composed of instructors from a Spanish university. This university did not offer online programs but did offer blended learning.
The number and categorization of instructors' roles are generally determined in the literature according to experts' reports/feedback (Thach & Murphy, 1995;Bezuidenhout, 2015). Some authors simply adopt a well-known, role-based educational model, thus inheriting the number and categorization of the roles according to the model elected (Abdulla, 2004;Liu et al., 2005). In those cases, the educational model is theory-driven (also known as a top-down approach) and, consequently, instructors' roles are firstly identified and are then operationalized using some educational indicators. Unlike state-of-the-art studies of this topic that estimate the number of instructor roles using a top-down approach (qualitative analysis), this study estimates the number of instructor roles using students' perceptions and a bottom-up approach (also known as data-driven) (i.e., a quantitative analysis where first, it is identified the existing indicators of effective instruction, next, existing correlations among indicators are analysed to cluster them in the optimal number of roles, and finally, they are categorized/named based on the indicators encompassing each role).

Defining the Outputs Required of Instructors in Asynchronous Learning Environments
The goal of this study is to define the existing dimensions (called roles in the educational context) and outputs of teaching in asynchronous learning environments according to students' perceptions, discarding the evaluation of instructors' competencies. Current research papers about the roles and competencies of online instructors include competencies, such as interpersonal communication, planning skills, and collaboration/teamwork skills. In this study, the teaching-learning items were evaluated for the online student community (as explained in the Introduction Section); if students were asked to rate these skills directly, we believe that the results would not be reliable. Furthermore, it is important to mention that this study will only focus on teaching duty (not management/service nor research duties), because teaching outputs are evaluated using students' perceptions and, in our opinion, students either do not have the ability to fairly assess their instructors' management/service and research duties or their assessments are not sufficiently accurate.
Three main sources were used to identify and validate qualitative and quantitative the indicators (desired outputs associated with the roles of an online university instructor). Firstly, a literature review done on 28 academic studies, which were published in international peer reviewed journal since 1995 to 2016. The manuscripts selected were organized according to: (i) the goal of our study, and (ii) the person who rates or defines the instructors' outputs, competencies, or roles (Table 1).

Participants
The study participants were 925 students from the UOC, selected by stratified random sampling.
Specifically, a total of 13,885 students enrolled in Psychology (6,364 students), Business Administration (

Data Analysis
Data analyses were run on two different samples to ensure the generalizability of the findings. Thus, the sample of 925 students was divided in two datasets, which were obtained by using stratified sampling based on two demographic variables: degree and sex. The first dataset, of 613 students, was used to assess the factor structure of the scale items through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). The second phase of the study used Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to test the factor structure of the scale obtained from the first stage through the other independent sample of 312 students.

Exploratory Factor Analysis
An EFA with promax rotation was performed on the first sample of 613 students. Oblique (promax) rotation allows the factors to correlate. Questions that did not correlate significantly to any factor were dropped. We used a factor loading cutoff of 0.   (Fisher & Frey, 2015). Furthermore, this role has special significance in online learning, where there is no physical classroom to promote relationships between students-instructor (group relationship) and student-instructor (individual relationship).
Thus, the EFA methodology clustered the two types of relationships in this factor.
All educators want to help their students succeed in life, even more so at university level, where students are being trained for a specific qualification. This fact is particularly reflected in Factor 4, which refers to instructors' role as life skills promoters. This role is encouraged by the European Union, the OECD, and UNESCO. Life skills can be defined as personal management and social skills that are necessary for adequate functioning on an independent basis (Gómez-Rey, Barbera Finally, the domain in which the instructor sets the main learning rules, routines, and procedures is represented in Factor 6, which corresponds to the managerial role. The managerial role has been extensively studied in the online learning literature by different authors. Instructors should use management, not to control their students, but rather to help them actively participate in the learning process. This role involves tasks such as the setting of minimal ethical norms, procedural rules (deadlines), and decision-making norms. Incorporating these rules in the syllabus that is provided to the students at the beginning of the course will help them to organize their time and their learning from the very beginning of the semester.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis
A confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the two samples to test the 6-factor solution obtained through EFA. R was used to run the confirmatory factor Analysis (CFA). Table 2 presents the results of the CFA.
Because of the large sample, we will scrutinize the fit indices, rather than the Chi-square, for assessing

Discussion and Research Implications
Despite the fact that the first 6-factors were retained as representative factors using the EFA and CFA methodologies, it is worth mentioning that from students' point of view, the pedagogical role (F1) is the most important (as the factor with the highest weight of variance), followed by the designer role

Study Limitations
Although this study expands our knowledge of the teaching work of online instructors in the 21 st century, certain limitations must be acknowledged. First, our study used mostly Spanish students.
Future research works will replicate this study across other cultures and settings in order to overcome this limitation. Second, this study was designed using a sample obtained from an asynchronous learning university and, therefore, the results may be specific to asynchronous learning environments.