Julianne Gallant
Author
Julianne Gallant
Affiliation
Cape Breton University
Abstract
This paper explores the importance of maintaining both a social presence and a teacher presence in an online classroom. When creating an online course, the instructional designer can increase the amount of social presence and teacher presence while offering a program in an online format. This paper will: (a) review how designers should keep in mind of the Community of Inquiry model which describes learning as an interaction of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence (Garrison et al., 2000); (b) review the importance of decreasing transactional distance, a theory that describes the function of dialogue, course structure, and learner autonomy in online environments (Moore, 1997); (c) discuss different Learning Management Systems that can be used when starting an online classroom, specifically Google Classroom, Moodle, and Edmodo; and (d) discuss the positives and negatives of synchronous and asynchronous interactions and how these can be used to increase social presence in online learning as well as describe technologies that can be used for both. The discussion on the types of technology that can be used to implement a social presence and a teaching presence should demonstrate that those presences can be effectively established in an online world.
Keywords
Online learning, community of inquiry, transactional distance, learning management systems, synchronous and asynchronous interactions
Overview
The importance of maintaining social presence and teacher presence in an online classroom (09:28)
Introduction
A common concern in online education is student engagement. If students are not feeling engaged there is a higher risk that they may choose to drop out of your online course or at the very least, they will not put forth their best performance. A benefit of putting in thought-out, front-end work while designing an online course is that it should maximize student engagement and increase their productivity. This paper should demonstrate that using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous interactions while offering an online course, is a way to reach a larger variety of learners. Your more social and talkative students will enjoy any live-stream synchronous events that are organized by the teacher whereas your more independent learners will be content to work at their own pace watching instructional videos or participating in asynchronous discussion groups. No matter the learner, students should be engaging with each other and their teacher on a regular basis in order to be fully present in their learning.
Literature Review
Community of Inquiry Model
The article Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education written by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) describes the Community of Inquiry model (Figure 1) in detail, allowing others to see the importance of its three core elements: cognitive presence,