Abstract
The coronavirus pandemic has affected higher education on a global scale. During the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic, university professors experienced deficiencies to convert their current full-time disciplines into a remote format ensuring learning outcomes. Technology-based communication, which was prevalent in online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated the issues associated with social presence. Social presence represents a crucial component of interactions that take place between instructors and students online remotely. This study reviews the social presence, with a focus on the research regarding the online teaching practices that demonstrate their effectiveness and relevance before and during COVID-19. The article begins by exploring the concept of social presence, distinguishing its correlations and interdependencies with other related concepts (empathy, student emotional, cognitive and behavioral engagement, learning outcomes, and motivation). The article offers a review of separate findings that investigate the teaching practices ensuring instructor presence and establishing stable contacts with learners. The data analysis reveals the main features vital for feelings of social presence from the online instructor. They include connectedness as the state of having timely communication with students, instructor responsiveness as the quality of having a quick or positive reaction from the instructor, online learning techniques, ensuring community building and empathy facilitation. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of social presence and the recommendations are given through three engagement strategies: management, connectedness and choice.
Highlights
The coronavirus pandemic has affected higher education on a global scale
Studying aspects of social presence of the online instructor is closely connected with analyzing empathy, a multidimensional concept, which in defined as “the extent to which one person is aware of the direct and tangible presence of another person” [8]
Social presence in online and remote education plays a crucial role correlating with other meaningful components including empathy, student emotional, cognitive and behavioral engagement, learning outcomes, and motivation [6, 13, 18]
Summary
Technology-based communication, which was prevalent in online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated the issues associated with social presence. Through an ongoing survey on digitally enhanced learning and teaching, the European University association found that in April and May, 2020, almost 90% of institutions had gone online, for all or most subjects [1]. The surveys detected that one of the challenges most frequently mentioned by students had been the lack of live communication. Over 6 thousand students from 153 universities in Russia took part in a survey managed by the rating agency RAEX-Analitika, which revealed that 70% of the surveyed had lacked face-to-face communication with their fellow students and professors. Higher School of Economics and Tomsk State University surveyed 10893 students of Russian universities during the first wave of the pandemic (March-April, 2020) and 24428 students during the second wave (May-June, 2020), see fig. Higher School of Economics and Tomsk State University surveyed 10893 students of Russian universities during the first wave of the pandemic (March-April, 2020) and 24428 students during the second wave (May-June, 2020), see fig. 1 [3]
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