Social Presence

Social presence is the ability of participants to identify with a community, communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships through projecting their individual personalities (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). Social presence is establishing an ongoing connection using synchronous and asynchronous communication to humanize student-instructor and student-student interactions in on-line courses. It is the ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally as ‘real’ people (i.e., their full personality) through the medium of communication being used.

Humanizing our online teaching also means showing emotions and deliberately attempting to foster a connection with our students in a safe learning environment. We can lose the less obvious verbal and non-verbal cues that we take for granted in our classrooms when we move to the online environment. Intentionally cultivating social presence means finding ways to overcome the barriers created by the technology and the transactional distance that results.

Online learning platforms provide spaces for interaction which engender high levels of student-student and student-teacher interaction, and therefore support models of teaching and learning that are highly interactive.

Three categories of indicators of Social Presence that we can look for are:

• Affective/Interpersonal via the expression of emotion, feelings and mood, as well as the sharing of personal information
• Open Communication that occurs when mutual trust has been established
• Group Cohesion occurs when individuals identify with and attach to a community