Adding Insult to Injustice

Exploring differences in the role of justice perceptions and social media use on vengeful dissent in online and on-campus education

Abstract

Demand for online higher education has grown considerably in recent years but comes with a unique set of challenges. Online students often experience lower sense of connection, which may give impetus to join student-led social media groups. Use of these groups may exacerbate another challenge: the reportedly greater levels of vengeful dissent towards staff from online students, which, in on-campus students, has been linked to low procedural justice perceptions.  This study explored the association between procedural justice perceptions and vengeful dissent in online and on-campus education, examining the moderating effect of student-led social media groups. A total of 127 adults (M age = 25.46, SD = 7.82; 73.22% female) who were either studying or had recently completed a degree at an Australian university in either fully online or on-campus mode (64 online; 63 on-campus) completed an online self-report survey. As hypothesised, low procedural justice perceptions were more strongly associated with greater vengeful dissent in online students and use of student-led social media groups strengthened the association in online students only. The findings represent the first to empirically explore the justice perception-dissent relationship in online learning and have several implications for policy and practice in navigating online education.