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chapter ONE
The Role of Presence in the Online Environment
Scenario 1. At thirty-five, Amanda is a newly enrolled learner in an online masterās program in adult education. She works full-time for a training and development company, is married, and has a small child. Time is a premium in her lifeāthatās why she chose to enroll in an online program. This is her first experience with online learning, and her technology skills are limited. She is worried about the differences between the face-to-face courses sheās so familiar with and the courses she will now be taking. She wonders how she will interact with the instructor and other learners, how she will be able to feel that she belongs to a community of learners and feel that this experience is āreal.ā She is so used to working with trainees on an interactive basis that she cannot imagine how the feeling of ābeing thereā and ābeing togetherā with others in this program will be possible. All she can envision is the computer and the books. She is beginning to feel lonely, anxious, and isolated.
Scenario 2. Carlos is a twenty-seven-year veteran instructor at a community college who was recently asked to offer his communications courses online. He is reluctant to do so because his classes are very interactiveāthey require small-group work, team project presentations, experiential field work, and active discussion. He worries that his years of teaching will be irrelevant. He does not understand how to adapt his course from the face-to-face to the online environment. He asks himself: How am I going to develop this course? What will my course feel and look like? How do I connect with my learners and get to know them? How will I adapt and implement the small-group work, team projects, and discussion activities to my online course? All he can see is the computer and his class materials.
As instructors and designers in the field of online education, we cannot overestimate the importance of creating a sense of presence in online teaching and learning. Close your eyes and envision for just a minute the basic difference between learning face-to-face and learning exclusively online. Even before the minute is up, it will likely be obvious to you that the basic difference is the separation between the instructor and the learner and between the learners and each other. This separation naturally leads to feelings of isolation on the part of instructors and learners alike and has been a major reason for learner dissatisfaction and lack of retention in the online learning environment (Palloff & Pratt, 1999), as suggested by Amandaās scenario at the beginning of this chapter. The feeling of isolation is due to a lack of awareness and understanding of the concept of presence. In scenario 2, Carlos, the inexperienced online instructor, needs to be aware of and understand the concept of presence in order to effectively adapt his course to this new environment and feel a connection with his learners.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND PRESENCE?
The Internet is a social space. Today, Internet technology is ever-present, completely woven into our lives. We accomplish many of our communications and transactions via the Web without even noticing. As a result of this omnipresent feeling, we tend to want to be together with others even though we canāt see them. These feelings of wanting to be together with others are often expressed through Internet-based social networking tools.
As Internet-based technology evolves in this social direction, it points to the importance of the sense of presence. To create presence in the online environment, we need to think, feel, and behave differently than we do in the face-to-face environment because we have to make an effort to be aware of the intentions of others and their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors when they are connected to us via technology (Biocca, Burgoon, Harms, & Stoner, 2001). When we become aware of and understand the differences between in-person and online interactions, we are better able to select appropriate technology and design learning environments that help create a sense of presence.
In this chapter, we will discuss why creating the sense of being there and being together is so important for online presence, define the concept of presence and the difference between presence and engagement, and explain the social, psychological, and emotional aspects of presence in the online environment.
CREATING A SENSE OF PRESENCE
Current research shows that when there is a sense of presence in online learning, it can greatly enhance the instructor-learner relationship (Munro, 1998). We agree with this research and believe that this goal can be accomplished. But this belief opens up an array of questions: What is a sense of presence? What does it look and feel like? How is it created? How is presence different from engagement?
What Is a Sense of Presence?
Biocca, Burgoon, Harms, and Stoner (2001) discuss the concept of presence as two interrelated phenomena: telepresence (the sense of ābeing thereā) and social presence (the sense of ābeing together with others,ā including people, animals, avatars, and so on). Telepresence in the online environment happens when learners have the impression or feeling that they are present at a location remote from their own immediate environment. Social presence means interactions with others in the online environment. We use the terms being there and being together in this book as the bases for our definition of a sense of presence.
What Does Presence Look and Feel Like?
From our perspective, a sense of presence is ābeing thereā and ābeing togetherā with online learners throughout the learning experience. It looks and feels as if the instructor has placed the learner at the center of the course development and created the course for that learner. It also looks and feels as if the instructor is accessible to the learners and that the learners are accessible to the instructor and each other, and that the technology is transparent to the learning process. Each learner is āthereā and ātogetherā with the instructor and with other learners as well. Learners are also involved in the design process by giving feedback and helping shape the online environment. In the process, all the Tās have been crossed and the Iās dotted for this experience. In other words, the instructor has taken into consideration the entire learning experience prior to the course, during the course, and at the end of the course, along with all of the elements that help make presence happen. These elements will be introduced later in this chapter.
How Is Presence Created?
The teaching-learning process for creating presence online may feel overwhelming to those like Carlos who are new to the online environment. But it does not need to be. This book will suggest strategies to decrease these feelings. Still, it is important to know that a sense of presence doesnāt just naturally happen. Creating presence is a result of awareness, understanding, involvement through experience, and intentional planning and design on the part of the instructor, the entire support team (that is, instructional designer, technical support, and so on), and the learners who participate in and help negotiate that design. When this process is thoughtfully implemented, the impact on the learnersālike Amandaācan be significant. It can create an awareness of what online presence means for them, help them break feelings of isolation, get them involved in the learning process, and bring them together in a virtual community.
How Is Presence Different from Engagement?
Engagement is only one aspect of presence: it is the participation of the instructor with learners or learners with other learners as they interact in the online environment. In contrast, presence includes the dynamic interplay of thought, emotion, and behavior in the online environment. This dynamic interplay takes place both consciously and unconsciously as instructors and learners experience both the real world and the online environment. We believe that presence will not be felt completely until this dynamic interplay has been realized. This book looks at social presence and engagement as aspects of presence rather than presence in its entirety.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT PRESENCE
In the current research discussion of presence in the world of online learning, the focus is on creating engagement, a rich environment for learner interaction, and a sense of community, which together result in an enhanced social presence. Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2001, 2003) describe this enhancement through engagement when they talk about producing a richer social atmosphere and generating a climate for high-level dialogue and critical thinking. Ijsselsteijn, de Ridder, Freeman, and Avons (2000) also address this idea when they speak of creating a sense of the learners and the instructors being together in an online classroom.
The concept of social presence has been extensively addressed in the literature. In Kehrwaldās (2008) study, it is defined as āan individualās ability to demonstrate his/her state of being in a virtual environment and so signal his/her availability for interpersonal transactionsā (p. 94). The ability to be social in a virtual space is affected by immediacy, degree of awareness, and willingness to engage in communication exchanges. Immediacy is fundamental to effective interpersonal transactions; the higher the interaction among learners and the instructor, the greater the level of social presence (Tu & McIsaac, 2002). Without participant awareness of being perceived as a ārealā person (ābeing thereā and ābeing togetherā) in mediated communications, there is a lack of social presence (Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997). Social presence also means there is a willingness on the part of participants to engage in communication exchanges. This willingness is motivated by purposeful interactions that benefit all. According to Kehrwald (2008), āMotivation is provided by either need, as in the case of learning tasks that require interaction, or interest, as in the case of relations that motivate ongoing interactionā (p. 97, italics in original).
Tu and McIsaacās (2002) research found that the social context, online communication, and interactivity affect social presence. The social context is created based on participantsā characteristics and their perception of the online environment. Online communication can positively influence social presence when it is stimulating, expressive, carries feelings and emotions, is significant, and is implicit. When interactions among participants are enjoyable, immediate, and reactive, and when participants are comfortable and recognize discussion themes, social presence is positively affected.
According to the research, social presence is central to the creation of effective online learning. Caspi and Blau (2008) have investigated the self-projection of participants onto the group and their identification with the group and found that they positively correlate with each other. They noted that social presence can effectively influence learning by creating a comfortable environment. They also found a positive correlation with aspects of perceived learning.
Moreover, Swan and Shihās (2005) investigation indicates that learners who perceive high social presence during online exchanges also think that they learn more from their interactions with others because they benefit from their ideas. They further suggest that learners may need to be socially engaged with online communities. In order for that to occur, learners need to be introduced to the notion of community building, knowledge construction as a group, and ways of being present during online discussions.
Supplementing the research on social presence and community, Gunawardena (1995) has added the importance of the online learner context. She says that the context in which participants learn and their relationships within that context have an effect on the online learning experience. Lehman (2006) expands on the concepts of social presence, community, and learner context by suggesting the creation of an environment that considers the perceptual nature of the learner. She describes this environment by using what we call a perceptual systems approach. This approach considers learners as perceivers who bring their individual knowledge, skills, attitudes, preferences, and diverse backgrounds to the online learning experience. From this perspective, learners are active perceivers, rather than passive receivers, during the entire online learning experience. The perceptual systems approach considers the learner to be central to the online learning experience before, during, and at the end of the course.
PRESENCE AS THE RESULT OF OUR PERCEPTUAL PROCESS
Why is creating presence so important? We are basically social creatures. When the social aspect is absent, we tend to crave it and look for ways to accommodate its absence. Our social nature is integral to our perceptual process when interacting with others not only in the real world but also in the online environment. Through the process of perceiving, we interact with information and others in the online environment, which requires others to relate to us and work with usāthis happens at the behavioral level. Individually we make sense of information for our use, for sharing, and for further interacting with others to refine and expand our knowledge. We search for appropriate resources to challenge, support, and enhance our experiences. We then reexamine the entire process by refining what we have integrated, resulting in circling back to repeat the process; this happens at both the cognitive and emotional levels. We continuously go through this process in the online environment from an individual point of viewāin other words, perceptually (Lehman, 1996, 2006). Because this process occurs at the subconscious level (Noe, 2005), it is difficult to notice when it is happening.
When thought, emotion, and behavior work together in our real-world experiences, we believe that we have created a successful perceptual experience and a sense of presence. Often we do not realize what happens when we are, for example, assigned to a small group in a face-to-face class (the environment), interacting with group members (with emotion), and focusing, following, and completing the group assignment (with thought, based on group behavior). This perceptual experience parallels the online learning experience, but in the online learning experience the instructor and learners are not in the same physical space. It is therefore necessary to intentionally rethink and redesign the course to incorporate the dynamic interplay of thought, emotion, and behavior so that the perceptual process is influenced and a sense of presence is created in the online environment.
For both Amanda and Carlos, perceptual presence is their sensory experience of ābeing thereā and ābeing togetherā with others. It involves their recognition of the online environment and their actions in response to this environment. Through the perceptual process, which involves thought, emotion, and behavior, they interact with information and others and feel as though they are together in this learning experience.
UNDERSTANDING PRESENCE
The concept of presence is complex and not easy to understand. Presence is the result of the dynamic interplay of thought, emotion, and behavior in the online environment, between the private world (that is, the inner world) and the shared world (that is, the outer world) (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007) and is rooted in the interactive (that is, enactive) perceptual process (Noe, 2005). Therefore, presence should be viewed from different perspectives: social, psychological, and emotional.
The Social Aspect
The first perspective involved in the concept of presence is social presence, a concept that surfaced in the 1970s when Short, Williams, and Christie (1976) wrote about individuals being seen as ārealā when communicating using media. They found that the amount of prese...
