A Model for Social Presence in an Online Classroom

Abstract

In order to better facilitate the social presence in an online classroom, this study attempted to build a model for measuring social presence and its relationships with other factors in online learning based on the social cognitive theory. A total of 535 valid samples were collected and analyzed from three schools in Taiwan. The results show that user interface and mediated communication have significant influences on social presence. User interface also has positive impact on mediated communication. Moreover, this study provided evidence that social presence has significant effects on interaction performance, and then interaction performance has significant effects on learning performance.