The Impact of Social Presence
Last year, eLearning spent a large portion of our time focusing on one aspect of the Community of Inquiry, teaching presence. This year, we wanted to address another component of the community inquiry model and its role in the online classroom. Social Presence. Social presence is loosely defined as the ability for a learner to project themselves into an online class, feel comfortable with the class setting, and the degree in which a learner is perceived as a "real person" in the online environment. Peer reviewed research into social presence has found the relationship between:
- social presence and student satisfaction (Borup, West, Graham, 2012; Gunawardena, 1997; Richardson & Swan, 2003)
- social presence and perceived learning (Caspi & Blau, 2008; Cobb, 2011; Richardson & Swan, 2003).
As stated in the linked article here from Richardson and Swan Download linked article here from Richardson and Swan, there are several implications from their research:
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Students reporting higher perceived social presence scores also perceived they learned more from the course than students with low perceived social presence scores. This indicates a relationship between social presence and perceived learning.
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Students who were most satisfied with their instructors also believed they learned more from their courses than students who were less satisfied with their instructors. This indicates a relationship between instructor satisfaction and perceived learning.
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Students with high overall social presence scores also indicated they were highly satisfied with their instructor. This implies that students’ perceptions of social presence were related to the perceptions of their instructors as having a satisfactory online presence in terms of amount of interaction and/or quality of that interaction.
As we saw with last year's focus on instructor presence, developing presence in the online classroom doesn't have to be daunting. While some strategies to develop social presence may require considerable time and effort, others are a low lift. The rest of this module is to look at those strategies, think about how they apply to our classroom, and make a plan to try one in our classroom.
For those of you who weren't at the Keynote Presentation for the eLearning Academy, watch Patrick's Lowenthal's presentation. He is a professor of educational technology at Boise State and is considered one of the leading experts in the research on social presence. If you are on a time crunch, you can skip ahead to 17 minutes and 30 seconds for the section of the presentation about social presence strategies.
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