| Increasingly, the widespread use of 'emoticons' has expanded
the range of online non-verbal cues and serves to capture a greater depth
of non-verbal communication, allowing students and faculty to work with
greater efficacy in a cross-cultural environment. Uptake of the most basic
emoticon image, the small yellow 'smiley face' invented by
Harvey Ball in 1963, is largely driven by the massive uptake of Yahoo!,
MSN and other free instant messenger services.
Universitas 21 Global (U21G), a fully online graduate school that is
a joint venture between Thomson Learning and Universitas 21, an international
network of 16 prestigious universities, looked at the extent to which
emoticons facilitate cross-cultural communication. U21G provides online
education in a diverse international setting with over 750 students in
40 countries, so non-verbal communication is actively encouraged through
email, discussion boards, and instant messenger tools. During the initial
11-month period that emoticons were in use by the Universitas 21 Global
MBA programme, postings on class discussion boards for one subject, 'Organisational
Behaviour', were examined in an attempt to understand the nature
and significance of emoticon use in an online educational setting.
Observing 5,626 postings on class discussion boards in 12 Organisational
Behaviour classes, the acceptance level of emoticons among students was
found to be widespread, with nearly 10 percent of posts containing emoticons.
Table 1: Frequency of use of different emoticons
As Table 1 illustrates, students were presented with a range of 20 emoticons
representing a wide variety of emotions and attitudes. A cursory analysis
of the frequency of use reveals two emoticons were heavily favoured: the
'big grin' (around 25 percent of total emoticon use) and the
'wink' (just over 20 percent of the total). Some emoticons
were not used at all and while one might argue that the 'arrow'
is not really an emoticon in the first place, the unpopularity of the
'evil' emoticon could be a reflection of the fact that many
people would not want to convey this sentiment except if it were tongue-in-cheek,
in which case the 'twisted' emoticon seems to suffice as this
was used by students in jest.
Emoticons expressing positive feelings ('big grin', 'smile',
'LOL', 'cool', 'wink', and 'razz')
were used most frequently: 457 times (approximately 75 percent of cases).
Interestingly, the individual frequencies of the 'big grin',
'smile', and 'LOL' (151, 79, and 68, respectively)
would suggest that students felt the need to differentiate between these
similar emotions. The use of the 'wink' - the second
most popular emoticon - is also significant in the context of a
multicultural educational setting because it guards against the possibility
of misinterpreted irony. Sarcasm, a prominent feature of humour in some
cultures, can be largely absent in others and, undetected, can lead to
serious misunderstandings.
Emoticons expressing negative feelings ('sad', 'mad',
'eek', 'confused', 'rolled eyes',
'red face', and 'cry'), although lower in frequency,
were also used in interesting ways by the students. The 'sad',
'mad', 'eek', 'rolled eyes' and 'confused'
emoticons were invariably used to denote stress and rising frustration,
not so much from the intellectual challenge of the MBA course, but from
the challenge of studying while working full-time and attending to family
and social commitments. The 'red face' emoticon (a GIF where
the face changes colour from yellow to a deep pink) symbolises embarrassment.
This was most commonly used by students to express humility in the event
of misunderstandings and/or an attempt to diffuse a potential conflict.
Interestingly, it is observed that this emoticon appears to be more widely
used by students in one-to-one communications via email rather than class-wide
discussion boards. Meanwhile, the 'cry' emoticon (another
GIF where the face sheds tears) was used 19 times, mostly in one class
where students used it to convey their feelings about some of their classmates
not being able to participate in the following class.
U21G's researchers also observed that emoticons were as equally
distributed in graded discussions as they were in informal discussions
and, just as students display different levels of non-verbal communication
in a face-to-face setting, this participation imbalance also prevails
in an online setting - as clear tendencies for some students to
be more 'demonstrative' than others.
Dr Sixl-Daniell notes that to ensure maximum student benefit in an online
class, it is important to get students engaged in the class, to get them
to "talk" to each other. Peer learning is an important and integral part
of the students' learning experience. They do learn from this as well
as from the professor and the readings for the class. Dr Sixl-Daniell
also notes that from her experience as an online educator "interaction"
in an online setting is by nature different from a face-to-face setting
in that channels of communication differ. This requires an active and
proactive professor who is online frequently and who is visibly present
in the virtual classroom. It greatly enhances the learning experience
and resulted in some classes at U21G that were more interactive than face-to-face
classes, with one class scoring more than 3,000 discussion postings alone,
not counting any interaction via email.
Overall, the study found that U21Global students actively use emoticons
to enhance the non-verbal aspect of their online communications. While
there were no disputes in any of the 12 classes during the 11-month period
under consideration, the readiness on the part of U21G students to use
non-verbal communication to avoid the possibility of such conflicts as
demonstrated by their widespread use of emoticons suggests an increased
likelihood of conflict without a method of non-verbal communication being
available, the professors observed.
In a multicultural setting, the probability of miscommunication is always
likely to be higher than in a monocultural setting. The scope for misunderstanding
is likely to be higher still if communication is limited to text where
there are no non-verbal cues to facilitate communication. To offset this
problem, emoticons offer a depth and range of non-verbal communication
at least equal to that in the non-virtual world, enhancing the quality
of interaction and minimising the potential for friction and misunderstanding
between learners.
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