Abstract:

Investigating Social Presence in Collaborative Keys for Asynchronous Courses

Asynchronous virtual courses have become increasingly popular in the years following the global Covid-19 pandemic. These courses, with no set meeting schedule, offer flexibility to both students and instructors, but pose challenges for developing a collaborative learning environment. The Community of Inquiry framework (Rourke et al., 1999) identifies three essential components in an online course necessary to foster a collaborative environment- teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence. Social presence is especially impacted in asynchronous learning settings, which presents challenges for the students to display their personalities and connect with the community. This study investigates Collaborative Keys (CKs), structured collaborative assignments given in an asynchronous class, to help remedy the lack of social interaction. Data were collected on Cal Poly students in an introductory statistics class in Winter 2023 on various indicators of social presence in the assigned CKs. This research examined the presence of social interactions over the duration of a quarter and their changes over time. Overall, high levels of social presence were observed in the CKs, suggesting they were successful in cultivating student engagement. Additionally, the relationship between social presence and academic performance in the course was investigated. Results include a significant positive association between the rate of cohesive social presence and student performance and a significant negative association between the rate of self-disclosure and student performance. These results will inform pedagogical approaches that incorporate collaborative learning into virtual environments and improve students’ experiences in asynchronous modes of instruction.

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