Over the weekend, I was thinking about the relationship between an online course and the social presence of the instructor and the classmates in the course. Here is what I am thinking.
I have designed online classes and taught a couple of course online. Some of the findings in the research paper I found here resonate my past experience of online course. For example, the immediacy and availability of teachers did influence my perception of the quality of online learning. If the instructors are responsive to emails and I received the response and solution on time, my satisfaction with this online course would be easily met. So seemed to my online students. I usually entertained them more with some streaming videos with me speaking and greeting inside. The social presence to an online course is as critical as what customer representatives to a credit card company. When assistance is requested, it expects prompt attention, or the quality and credentials of the course will be downgraded. Therefore it did not surprise me when Capsi and Blau claim in their paper that “social presence accounts for half of the variance of learning satisfaction”.
Many studies claimed strong correlations between social presence and students’ learning satisfaction. Students’ learning satisfaction differs from the actual learning outcome of the online course. As Capsi and Blau did, many studies treated “perceived learning” as a way to gauge student’s actual learning outcome. The student’s self-estimation of what he has learned from an experience could be largely different from the learning objectives and goals set up the instructors. The trick is that most online courses have qualitative learning outcomes instead of quantitative learning outcomes. For example, TE 150 online requires students to acquire an understanding of different learning theories. It is also hard to measure students’ learning outcome in face-to-face class, pre- and post- tests are almost infeasible, given the nature of the class. So many studies used “perceived learning” as a solution to gauge students’ achievement. I could envision the possibility to measure students’ actual learning outcome in an online statistic class such as CEP 932. Then it would be interesting to know how social presence influence students’ learning in an online statistic class. The research result could become more transparent.
An essential part of students’ learning satisfaction comes from students’ feeling of closeness and connection with the classmates and professors. In face-to-face class, we usually leave a class with a thorough familiarity with the professor and also make friends with a couple of classmates, because smiles and nods ongoing would confirm us the friendliness and accessibility of them. However, in online course, the students and the professors seem only to build passing familiarity. The lack of nonverbal cues and the laborious nature of text-based communication hinder the bonds between the students and the professors. Therefore, the shortage of deep communication and nonverbal communications cues necessitate the purposeful use of instructional techniques to enhance social presence.