Social presence is the key to higher academic achievement
Social presence is “the ability of students to project themselves socially and emotionally, as ‘real’ people” (Lowenthal (2009, p.3). Lowenthal is absolutely right in the way he defined social presence as ability to express yourself as being a real person. Before starting MAT program at AUCA, studying online seemed very hard and ineffective for me. I thought online learning is ineffective because I studied English language online for three months in Afghanistan. In those three months, I did not improve much that I expected. The reason was that I did not feel like a real person in my English classroom. Neither the teacher nor the students turned on their cameras during the session. Moreover, we had lots of individual tasks. Since we did not have access to a good internet connection, we needed to skip most of our online classes instead the teacher was giving more assignments. I was doing the assignment but if I faced any problem, there was no one to help me. Thus, I did have social presence in that class. That was the reason I was scared of online learning.
But from the time I started studying MAT program, I realized that online learning is as effective as in-person learning if you are lucky enough to have good professors and friendly classmates. During the MAT classes, I always feel like a real student who is studying normal university lessons, because we had social presence. The teacher was always available to help us. Additionally, we were given a bunch of assignments to do in pairs and in groups. So I got to know others in the classroom. I became friends with my classmates and we worked together online, but it seemed like in person. As a result, it helped in having higher academic achievements, which led to my satisfaction with online learning. Lowenthal (2009) also stated that social presence leads to students’ satisfaction with their learning. Students satisfaction leads to academic achievement which is the main goal of learning.
Lowenthal (2009) also believes that social presence influences social interaction between teacher-students and students with students. In this way, positive student-student interaction leads to motivation in learning. Working in pairs, and in groups is the best way for cultivating positive relationships among students. It is an opportunity that helps students to interact with one another and not feel alone. Because most people who do not have social presence feel lonely in online learning. Therefore, interaction with professor and classmates encourage students to learn and enable them to help each other at any time. Consequently, social presence is the key to academic achievement for most of students in online learning.
Lowenthal, P. R. (2009). Social presence. In Encyclopedia of Distance Learning, Second Edition (pp. 1900-1906). IGI Global.