INSTRUCTOR SOCIAL PRESENCE: Learners’ Needs and a Neglected Component of the Community of Inquiry Framework

Social presence theory was the term first proposed in 1976 to explain how telecommunications influence how people communicate (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976). Short and colleagues (1976) defined socialpresence as the degree of salience (i.e., quality or state of being there) between two communicators using a communication medium. This theory became particularly important for online educators trying to understand how people communicated in primarily text-based online courses during the 1990s (Lowenthal, 2009). In fact, social presence was identified as one of the core elements of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, a widely used guide for planning, developing, evaluating, and researching online learning (Boston et al., 2009; Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007; Kumar, Dawson, Black, Cavanaugh, & Sessums, 2011; Kumar & Ritzhaupt, 2014; Swan, Day, Bogle, & Matthews, 2014). The Col framework is a dynamic process model of online learning based on the theory that effective learning requires a community based on inquiry (Garrison, 2011, 2015). At the heart of the model are the interdependent constructs of cognitive, social, and teaching presence (Swan, Garrison, & Richardson, 2009). Social presence, the first element, is the ability of participants “to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to other participants as ‘real people’" (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000, p. 89). The second element, teaching presence, involves instructional management, building understanding, and direct instruction. And the third element, cognitive presence, is “the extent to which the participants in … a community of inquiry are able to construct meaning through sustained communication” (Garrison et al., 2000, p. 89).