Much research literature attests that social presence correlates with student perception and performance (Richardson & Swan, 2003). Although the results of many surveys assert a lack of teacher presence in distance education courses positively correlates to student performance, analyzing the design of the studies shows a glaring omission. In many of the studies, there seems to be no definition of what the term “presence” refers to in the survey data. As a result, the conclusions drawn from many of these studies may be suspect.
Coming from a liberal arts background with a philosophical bent, I join Socrates and ask, “If strides are being made to rectify social presence in online instruction because of research, what actually IS presence?” Is it referring to simply a time-spacial relationship or “transactional distance” (Moore, 2013). If so, can synchronous tools like webconferencing and IM produce it? Or, does technology mediated communication serve as simulacra rather than actual presence (Baudrillard, 1994)? Is a lack of social presence a breakdown in the teacher-student transactional relationship? Is it a Wittgensteinian language game (Wittgenstein, 1968)?
Oftentimes, the results from survey data about online teacher presence are more obfuscated by the definition of terms. What do they really mean when they say the teacher is not present? Sung & Mayer (2012) insist that “social presence refers to the feeling of connection learners have with the instructor and with other learners” (p. 1738). So, is it a mere affect? Do they mean accessible? Are they referring to flexibility? Organized? Transparency? If Sung & Mayer are correct, then a learner could be just as socially disconnected in a F2F class as one that is online. So, what is the difference between the two modalities?
This is more than futile debates of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it is the classic “the one and the many” conundrum that cuts to the core of what is meant by teacher presence. What does it mean to say something is present? Where does it start and stop? At what point does presence cease or perhaps become something else? Is the problem of teacher presence in online courses an actual or perceptual one? In the continuum of increasing distance from the learner, at what point does the correlation with learning cease? In other words, how absent can a teacher be without it correlating with student performance?
Answers to these questions are at the heart of the Instructional Designers craft. Yet, many studies referred to as verifying that social presence is a problem in online learning use only practitioner language to qualify the concept. They may have questions like, “Does the instructor provide personal video instruction? webconferences? IMs? Do they respond to questions in a timely matter?” The problem remains that these questions presume that the features are more-or-less indicative of actual social presence in the course. An assumption that has not been validated.
If presence is dictated by either time-space or sensory perceptions, other complexities make a qualitative grasp of presence difficult. Suppose that a teacher was standing up in front of the classroom giving a lecture and pointing to things on the whiteboard that demonstrated the points she was making. Was she present? Sure.
What if there was so much distance that the students in the back row couldn’t see or hear her. Was she present? If it was a time-space issue that lost the teacher’s presence, how much space does it take to lose presence? What if they only saw half of her because of obstructions and only heard every other sentence? What about one-third… one-fourth… one-tenth? If it was lack of audio-visual stimulus being received by the student that determined whether she was present or not, how much stimulus warranted social presence? If they personally liked the teacher, would they “feel” connected to her no matter how much instruction they actually received? So, if social presence is just a feeling, designers should be focusing their attention on cultivating feelings of the learners rather than tech tricks to mimic real life relationships.
Now, suppose that same teacher had laryngitis and could but whisper, so the teacher shows a YouTube video of a recording she made the previous year, but was in the classroom and as students asked questions, she would type her answers on a Word document in real time and show it on the projector. What if she didn’t have a projector and decided to send an email response that afternoon when she returned to her office? Was there “teacher presence” in the delivery of the lesson? If the lack of teacher presence was caused by a disjointed time-sequence where the teacher’s feedback was delayed because of a lack of technology, then instructional designers need to focus on technology tools that will close the time delay for student feedback rather than trying to mimic cues of physical presence (Tracy & Spencer, 2005).
What if after the session, the laryngitis teacher provided written assessments that she graded and returned to the students the following class period? If it is time-delay that reduces teacher presence, then that affect should be present in every traditional class that assigns homework and quizzes, then provides feedback days and weeks later. So, a researcher would expect there to be no significant difference between the F2F class and that of the online when it comes to perceptions of teacher presence, but alas with notable exceptions that is not the case (Di & Jaggars, 2014).
What if that same teacher found a professionally produced lecture by a noted instructor that better explained the information and gave simulations to follow the video? Has the teacher’s presence now been reduced because it was not her face, voice, and body language that presented the material? If presence is an audio-visual perception on the part of the learner, irrespective of time-space, then teacher presence has been diminished because it was not the teacher’s face or voice. In those cases, the ID should focus on capturing audio-visual content directly from the SME.
What if the voiceless teacher’s malady was protracted over a week, month, semester? So, weeks, months, the entire semester, the instructor harvested videos and showed them in class along with the simulations. Would there still be an actual reduction in teacher presence? Again, if presence is basically a time-space issue, the answer would be, “No” because the teacher would be in the classroom administering the computer mediated tools. If it were an audio-visual perception, it would depend on whether the student could see and hear her or not.
What if the disease that took the teacher’s voice was contagious, so the doctor would not allow her to be in the same room with her students? So, the muted teacher worked from her office and showed the same videos online. Then, she assigned the simulations, answered student’s questions through email, and assessed their performances without seeing the students. Is there now a decreased teacher presence? The mechanics of instruction are exactly the same. The only change would be the physical space the teacher occupied while all instruction is being mediated through technology. In this instance, would there be any difference between the teacher’s spacial location and student performance? I could easily theorize that there would be no difference between the two. At the same time, some studies indicate that not to be the case (Clark & Mayer, 2016)
If there was no such difference, there is a strong argument to be made that the correlation of teacher presence and student performance is not associated with whether the class is F2F or online. The studies that claim to have made the case are suspect because they did not adequately qualify what they mean by teacher or social presence. And, the Russell (1997) meta-analysis of 300 research studies continues to hold true that there remains “no significant difference” between the two.
So in light of this critical analysis, what are the practitioners of Instructional Design to do about “social presence,” especially as it relates to the instructor? First, understand that the jury is still out as to what constitutes actual social presence that does in fact correlate with student learning. Yet, it is clear that interaction is not enough (Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005). Second, use the current conventional tools of social learning theory and select tech tools that would best facilitate it . Third, remain in research mode and test outcomes to see if the design does in fact facilitate those principles and effectively translate into student learning and skill development.
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References
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning: John Wiley & Sons.
Di, X., & Jaggars, S. S. (2014). Performance gaps between online and face-to-face courses: Differences across types of students and academic subject areas. Journal of Higher Education, 85(5), 633-659.
Garrison, D. R., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2005). Facilitating cognitive presence in online learning: Interaction is not enough. The American journal of distance education, 19(3), 133-148.
Moore, M. G. (2013). The Theory of Transactional Distance. In Handbook of distance education (pp. 84-103): Routledge.
Richardson, J., & Swan, K. (2003). Examing social presence in online courses in relation to students’ perceived learning and satisfaction. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/18713
Russell, T. L. (1997). The “no significant difference” phenomenon as reported in 248 research reports, summaries, and papers: North Carolina State University.
Sung, E., & Mayer, R. E. (2012). Five facets of social presence in online distance education. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(5), 1738-1747.
Tracy, R., & Spencer, B. (2005). Learning with invisible others: Perceptions of online presence and their relationship to cognitive and affective learning. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 8(1), 54-62.
Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical investigations (3d ed.). New York,: Macmillan.