Instructor Social Presence: Learners' Needs and a Neglected Component of the Community of Inquiry Framework (original) (raw)

Social presence theory was the term fi rst proposed in 1976 to explain how telecommunications infl uence how people communicate (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976). Short and colleagues (1976) defi ned social presence 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 identifi ed 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 CoI framework is a dynamic process model of online learning based on the theory that effective learning re...