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TopSocial Presence
Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (1999) defined presence as the ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally, as real people through the medium of communication being used. More specifically, social presence represents the degree of feeling, perception, and reaction of being connected by CMC to another intellectual entity through electronic media (Tu & McIsaac, 2002). It will influence online social interaction, and impact individual instrumental voice, value-expressive voice, and the group interaction process (Roberts, Lowry, & Sweeney, 2006).
Researchers argue that social presence may instigate, sustain, and support cognitive and affective learning objectives by making group interactions appealing, engaging, and intrinsically rewarding (Rourke et al., 2001). Cognitive learning evaluations suggest that the social presence of teachers is positively related to perceived learning (Russo & Benson, 2005) and perceived satisfaction (Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997). When social presence is combined with a positive teaching presence, the groups examined demonstrated high levels of cognitive learning. In fact, Garrison et. al. (2010) emphasized on the importance of teaching presence on learners’ social presence, such as nonverbal and verbal communication skills of instructors enhance the social presence of learners. It is clear that higher social presence would lead to better performance on written assignments and encouraged greater interaction in group assignments (Polhemus, Shih, & Swan, 2001). When examining frequency of discussion dialogues, studies consonant with the results that higher social presence would initiate and maintain a greater quantity of interactions, responses, and lengths of postings (Russo & Benson, 2009).
Clearly, social presence has a positive relationship with affective learning because its foundation is socio-cultural learning. Russo and Benson (2009) concluded higher social presence would lead to more positive attitude toward courses while Gunawardena et al. (2001) indicated social presence facilitates the building of trust and self-disclosure within online learning environments.