Developing an instrument to measure social presence in distance higher education

Abstract

This paper examines the construct of social presence and develops an instrument to measure social presence in distance higher education. Social presence is regarded as an important factor to understand psychological and emotional relations among distant learners, especially when constructivism and discourse based learning are emphasised. Items initially drawn from the literature were reviewed by experts in relevant fields and extracted through exploratory and confirmatory analyses. Then correlation analysis was executed to see the relationship between social presence and other learning variables. As a result, this study confirmed four factor constructs of social presence: mutual attention and support, affective connectedness, sense of community and open communication, and also generated and verified a social presence instrument with a total of 19 items.