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.