Eunmo Sung

Five facets of social presence in online distance education

Social presence in online learning environments refers to the degree to which a learner feels personally connected with other students and the instructor in an online learning community. Based on a 19 item Online Social Presence Questionnaire (OSPQ) given to college students in two different online learning courses, a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses consistently revealed five factors representing facets of social presence in online learning environments: social respect (e.g. receiving timely responses), social sharing (e.g., sharing information or expressing beliefs), open mind (e.g., expressing agreement or receiving positive feedback), social identity (e.g., being called by name), and intimacy (e.g., sharing personal experiences). Together, the five factors accounted for 58% of the variance and were based on 19 items. Although much previous research focuses on cognitive aspects of learning in online environments, understanding the role of the learners sense of presence may be particularly important in distance learning situations in which students and the instructor are physically separated.

When graphics improve liking but not learning from online lessons

The multimedia principle states that adding graphics to text can improve student learning (Mayer, 2009), but all graphics are not equally effective. In the present study, students studied a short online lesson on distance education that contained instructive graphics (i.e., directly relevant to the instructional goal), seductive graphics (i.e., highly interesting but not directly relevant to the instructional goal), decorative graphics (i.e., neutral but not directly relevant to the instructional goal), or no graphics. Following instruction, students who received any kind of graphic produced significantly higher satisfaction ratings than the no graphics group, indicating that adding any kind of graphic greatly improves positive feelings. However, on a recall posttest, students who received instructive graphics performed significantly better than the other three groups, indicating that the relevance of graphics affects learning outcomes. The three kinds of graphics had similar effects on affective measures but different effects on cognitive measures. Thus, the multimedia effect is qualified by a version of the coherence principle: Adding relevant graphics to words helps learning but adding irrelevant graphics does not.