LOL! Laughter in Online Learning: Humor’s Role in Student Motivation

LOL! Laughter in Online Learning: Humor’s Role in Student Motivation ABSTRACT "T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Humor is also a way of saying something serious.” As enrollment in the online environment increases, it becomes incumbent upon faculty to understand the dynamics of student motivation and retention in this non-traditional setting. A goal of every instructor is to be effective in the class by engaging students. One possible way to effectively engage students is by the interjection of humor into the classroom. It has been shown that humor has the ability to encourage that engagement (Powers, 2005). This may be true for a traditional classroom setting where visual cues are readily apparent, but what of the online classroom? "