Students social presence in online learning: a review

Abstract

One of the most highlighted issue in online learning as mentioned by Badrinathan and Gole (2011), is the teacher or instructor is responsible to ensure that interaction occurs among students. The interaction plays important role to encourage students to share opinion, think and argue critically, and respond towards peer’s reflection via computer mediated communication (CMC). To support the idea of having interactive and meaningful communication, Short et al (1976) had promoted a theory called social presence. This theory has then been frequently implemented and selected to be the core subject experimented in previous studies (Richardson & Swan, 2003; Rourke et.al, 1999; Wenger, 1998; Tu, 2001; Saenz, 2002; Lapadat, 2003; Sung & Mayer, 2012). As a result, Cobb (2009) clarifies that social presence should be nurtured for the successful of online learning.