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The Impact on the Social Presence to the Online Learner

Thesis Statement: Social presence is paramount to establishing and sustaining personal

connectivity in a collaborative learning environment.

IntroductionOnline learners learn through personal experiences and through experiences

shared by others provided via a virtual community environment. In online the online

environment, the communication format of asynchronous text via a computer-mediated

conferencing (CMC) presents a problem due to the lack of visual and auditory cues,

which assist in creating a socially rich environment like that of traditional education.

Reflecting on a case study of a university-level CMC course, Mark Bullen (1998) stated

that:

“For some students the lack of facial expressions and voice intonation

made computer conferencing a less human form of communication. For

these students there was no “virtual community”.” (p. 9).

The challenge of practitioners is to build or encourage social presence in online learning

that will overcome the absence of visual and auditory cues. Without a personal and

social connection to learning, an online community can not be sustained. Student

interaction and communication aid in creating a social environment. Some scholarly

works have debated CMC’s ability to support social and affective interactions, but the

research of literature performed in this paper should counter their doubts.

Many first-comers to online education will experience difficulty with

transitioning to the lack of visual and verbal expressions to which they are accustomed to

from past experiences in traditional education and may drop out; therefore it is the

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teacher that will need to establish a social environment on the first day or during pre-

course period, and then model, encourage, monitor, and facilitate the social environment

throughout the remainder of class to avoid a breach in connection to learning. Can a

social environment be established in an online classroom that is restricted of visual and

auditory cues, and if so, how can such a task be accomplished? This paper will answer

these questions, and then prove that social presence is paramount to establishing and

sustaining personal connectivity among students in a collaborative learning environment.

To prove my position, I will break socio-affective learning into the four following topics:

Communicative responses of social presence that tighten the bond of an online

community

The teacher’s role in social presence

Measurement strategies that assess social presence for the online teacher

Research study results on social presence and collaborative learning

Social Presence and Communicative ResponsesRourke et al. (2001) define social presence as the “ability of learners to project

themselves socially and emotionally in a community of inquiry” (p. 4). Social presence

is only one of three important elements of Rourke et al.’s (2001) community of inquiry

model that aims to identify the quality of teaching and learning interactions in online

learning. The other two elements that create the community of inquiry are teaching

presence, which represent the design and management of the structure and process of

learning, and cognitive presence, which represent the ability of students to construct

knowledge through communication. Social presence primarily supports both affective

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and cognitive objectives of teaching (Rourke et al., 2001) in an online collaborative

learning environment.

Researchers continually debate the credibility of social presence in the online

learning by arguing that students in asynchronous CMC environments can not project any

type of emotion, thus no social presence without being seen or audibly heard. These

researchers base their thoughts on the capabilities of the employed medium, rather than

the ability of the student to recreate their thoughts, expressions, and behavior within the

selected medium in a text-based expressive manner…or in other words by way of

“personal perceptions” (Rourke et al., 2001). In developing a method to assess social

presence in a CMC environment, Rourke et al. (2001) developed a form of analysis

through content coding. They were able to determine that there are three categories of

communicative responses: affective responses, interactive responses, and cohesive

responses. Furthermore, they indexed indicators of social interaction. By reviewing

these responses, we are able to prove the naysayers against online social presence wrong

and conclude that students are actively casting their attitudes, mood, feelings, and

behaviors in a text-based environment. The naysayers will also see that these aspects of

the student are detrimental to knowledge construction in the online learning community.

Communicative ResponsesAffective responses represent emotions, feelings, and mood which are

indicated by expression of emotions, humor, and self-disclosure in a CMC

environment. By using affective indicators such as emoticons, capitalization, and

punctuation, students can express feelings of joy, confusion, sadness, etc.

Emoticons are a great way of expressing emotion. Emoticons are written

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characters of text that serve as a visual representation of facial expressions and

other expressions of emotion. Garrison & Anderson (2003) note that humor can

express goodwill (p. 51) and initiate discussion, but should be used when

appropriate so that students don’t get isolated (p. 54). Teachers skilled in

inflicting social presence will ask students to connect content to personal life

experiences; this process is what Rourke et al. (2001) call self-disclosure. Self-

disclosure involves sharing personal details of life outside of the classroom; this

enables students to bond because some students can identify with those shared

similar experiences and feel as if they know their peers more.

Interactive responses build relationships among students and their teachers

through threaded discussion (open communication). Interactive responses

encourage participation by “recognizing, complimenting, and responding to

messages” (Garrison & Anderson, 2003, p. 51). In the online environment, you

will find several indicators of interactivity such as continuing a thread, quoting

another student’s message, referring explicitly to others’ messages, asking

questions, and complimenting, expressing appreciation, and expressing

agreement. Expressing these indicators or something as simple as replying to

someone’s comment can give the students feelings of acceptance and fulfillment,

and will encourage them to continue to participate and share with the community.

Rourke et al. (2001) note that needs of affiliation and self esteem can only be

accomplished through human interaction (p. 8).

Cohesive responses involve group activity discussion, to which glues the

students bond together. Student cohesion has a direct effect on student learning

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outcomes, as the discussion prompts deep thought and knowledge construction.

Garrison & Anderson’s (2003) statement supports this though when they state that

“when students perceive themselves as part of a community of inquiry, the

discourse, the sharing of meaning, and the quality of leaning outcomes will be

optimized” (p. 53). Indicators that best represent cohesive responses include

vocatives, and addressing or referring to groups using phatics and salutations.

Vocatives involve addressing students by first name; they are important to

showing the student that they have a voice and are being heard, and build strong

relationships among students. The use of vocatives helps to diminish the

“faceless” barrier behind CMC and demonstrate to all students that they definitely

are people behind the technology, whereas phatics confirm social cohesion

(Rourke et. al., 2001).

Teacher’s Role in the Social PresenceIt is the teacher’s responsibility to facilitate social presence in an online

collaborative learning environment. Tu (2002) observes that the teacher must “create an

environment that trains users to create social presence in a text-based medium and build

awareness in an online learning community” (p. 18). Reflecting on the previous

statement, the teacher needs to understand that their role in facilitating social presence in

the online classroom is a very critical component to the overall success of the classroom,

because without social presence, a learning community could not thrive. The teacher

should map out a plan on how to introduce the students to the new and acceptable

behaviors in an online community and inform them of how it will impact not just

themselves, but the entire class environment. An effective way to introduce students to

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the concept of social presence would be to give them a brief tutorial about it, and then

assign them a relatively easy pre-week activity catered towards using the differing types

of communicative responses. At the end of the pre-week the students would be

responsible for revealing how they felt to use or accept the communicative response, and

then the teacher could tie-in how socio-affective responses encourage learning and bring

together all students closer to a tight-nit community that invokes a broader sense of

learning. The teacher might also suggest that all students post biographies, and pictures,

or avatars, of themselves to increase familiarity among students and to give them a visual

connection of their peers. In reviewing student perception results on course design and

facilitation, Bullen (1998) notes that student’s would have like to participated in social

activities to get to know each other prior to participating in discussions (p. 11)…this is

another great strategy that a teacher could implore to increase social presence during pre-

week. In his Mykota (2007) proclaims that providing pre-course introduction of CMC

usage will: assist students with understanding their role and responsibilities in the online

environment, ensure that they perform to the best of their abilities in assignments and

other course work, and not apply tradition education communication skills to the online

environment.

During progression throughout the course, the teacher can use multiple methods

to track group cohesiveness, and encourage or intervene in the online community as

needed. The best practices in encouraging social presence in an online community are to:

share personal experiences, actively participate in asynchronous conference discussions,

responding to student by their first names (Mykota, 2007), and respond to questions in a

time sensitive manner. Most importantly, a teacher should model appropriate message

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and responses (Garrison, 2003). By conducting these non-complex tasks, students will

feel important, comforted, and as if they belong.

Measurement Strategies for Social PresenceSocial presence analysis should be considered by researchers and most

importantly teachers to ensure that the students are getting the best possible learning

outcomes. Mykota & Duncan (2007) discuss this thought when they explain that “social

presence is one of the more important constructs to determine the level of interaction, and

effectiveness of learning in an online environment” (p. 161). There are not too many

methods of content analysis developed and studied by researchers available that take a

look at the quantity of social presence in computer conferencing. More development of

these methods would allow for teachers and researchers to see a relationship between

learning outcomes and social, cognitive, and teaching presences. The method that I will

discuss is Rourke et al.’s (2001) social presence density calculation.

In their quest for an accurate and useful tool to assess social presence in a CMC

environment, Rourke et al. (2001) developed a template based equal on their 12

indicators of communicative responses. The main goal of their method was to identify

low or high frequencies of social presence, with low indicating a distant environment,

and high indicating a pleasant environment. Their method called for observations of

specific indicators within posted comments on of both a “thematic” and “syntactical”

units (Rourke et al, 2001). Three researchers worked together to initially code comments,

and then develop a protocol establishing rules and procedures for individual coding. In

the next step of their method, two of the coders independently code the student messages.

Finally, the coder’s data is calculated into percent agreement estimates of interrater

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reliability using a coefficient of reliability figure. Reflecting on the results of their study,

this method could be improved to apply more focus and different ratings on indicators of

more importance and higher frequencies…Rourke et. al (2001) applied equal weighting

to all indicators in their method. It can be proven that the differences of courses may

provide more opportunities for certain communicative indicators, for example, some

courses invoke more small study groups, which in turn teachers would cause teachers to

expect more cohesive indicators. This method was created in 2001, but research

conducted for this paper hasn’t found a notable amount of scholarly articles to identify

any successful or meaningful methods to assess social presence.

Research Study Results on Social Presence and Collaborative Learning

Stacey (2002) performed two studies that researched small group collaborative

learning. The first study reviewed messages sent within a small group of students in

Australia within a Masters of Business Administration program. The results of the study

identified that more than 50% of the messages were applicable to binding the group

together in a supportive and encouraging manner (Stacey, 2002); these messages helped

the students to feel part of the group.

The second study divulged deeper into the connection between learning outcomes

and the group environment, and also looked into the role of the teacher to establish social

presence in the online community. Stacey (2002) categorized the both teacher and

student messages into Rourke et al.’s (2001) social presence communicative responses

(affective, interactive, and cohesive) week by week, and was able to identify that the

teacher’s influence of social presence was detrimental to the success of the classroom.

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The teacher posted the most social presence discussion comments in the first week of the

course. In this first week, the teacher adequately modeled social presence, and in the

following weeks the students successfully masked their teacher’s behavior within the

overall community and most notably within their small groups. Looking deeper into the

small group environment, one would assume that stronger relationships would thrive due

to the consistent and continual discussion with the same members; thus saying, these

group members have a common interest and build social and emotional support

relationships in order to come to a consensus on tasks, goals, and theories.

This research study was able to conclude that teachers play a major role in

initiating and facilitating social presence among students as previously discussed in the

“Teacher’s Role in Social Presence” section of this paper. The students were able to

identify affective, interactive, and cohesive behaviors modeled by the instructor, analyze

those behaviors, and understand that it was appropriate and expected to be imitated. This

research study was also able to conclude that social presence served as motivation for the

students to and establish relationships and increase cognitive discussion (Stacey, p. 292).

ConclusionLajbcyier (2005) said that “Social presence and teacher responsiveness and the

way in which sociality develops is important in developing the interaction that

contributes to positive cognitive learning experiences” (p. 7). This paper has identified

that social presence is integral to developing an insightful learning environment. The

social relationships that students develop with each other and their instructors will help

them to fill the void of isolation and will motivate them to interact more frequently and

develop a better understanding of content. This paper also identified the importance of

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the teacher’s role in initiating social presence. The teacher must model the expected

behavior to encourage students to follow in suit. The teacher can develop an abundance

of activities, such as allowing the student to identify those feelings of isolation in the pre-

week or first week of discussion, then subsequently following up with the entire student

body by explaining how social presence may solve the feelings of isolation. This paper

concluded by discussing measurement strategies and research findings of social presence.

Distance Education and communicative technology is constantly changing, thus further

research and methods of assessing social presence need to be performed to ensure that

social presence methods are implemented into communicative technology to generate

student relationships and meaningful learning.

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