Abstract
“Social presence,” the degree to which participants in computer-mediated communication feel affectively connected one to another, has been shown to be an important factor in student satisfaction and success in online courses. This mixed methods study built on previous research to explore in greater depth the nature of social presence and how it develops in online course discussions. The study combined quantitative analyses of survey results from students enrolled in four online graduate courses, and qualitative comparisons of students with the highest and lowest perceptions of social presence. Quantitative results revealed significant correlations between perceived social presence and satisfaction with online discussions, and teased apart the respective influences of the perceived presence of instructors and peers. The findings indicate that the perceived presence of instructors may be a more influential factor in determining student satisfaction than the perceived presence of peers. Correlations with other course and learner characteristics suggest that course design may also significantly affect the development of social presence. Qualitative findings support the quantitative results. In addition, they provide evidence that students perceiving the highest social presence also projected themselves more into online discussions,and reveal meaningful differences in perceptions of the usefulness and purpose of online discussion between students perceiving high and low social presence.
Highlights
It differs from these previous studies in that it teased apart the perceived social presence of peers from the perceived social presence of instructors to examine their relative influences on student perceptions, and in that it explicitly addressed these factors in the context of threaded discussion
The questionnaire used in this research (Appendix A) was adapted from Richardson and Swan’s [21] social presence survey
Changes were made to distinguish between the perceived social presence of peers and instructors, to relate perceived learning to online discussion, and to add a perceived interaction construct
Summary
The Internet has had a profound impact on higher education, enabling the phenomenal growth of online learning. Short and colleagues contended that different communication media convey varying degrees of social presence based on their ability to transmit nonverbal and vocal information This notion, was challenged by researchers in the field who showed that perceived social presence in online interactions varies among participants in the same mediated conversations [16, 20, 25]; and that many participants perceived online discourse as more personal than traditional classroom discussion. Picciano [23] defined social presence as “a student's sense of being and belonging in a course.” He used survey items similar to ones used by Gunawardena and Zittle [20] and Richardson and Swan [21] to measure perceived social presence, interactivity, and learning among students enrolled in an online graduate course in education, and found strong correlations among these variables.
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