This document summarizes Whitney Kilgore's experience collaborating on a book chapter with Dr. Patrick Lowenthal about an experiment in social presence in an online course. The chapter discusses the design of the 4-week MOOC course aimed at promoting social presence using the Community of Inquiry framework. It provides results from a survey of 56 participants which showed high social presence, though some felt less comfortable disagreeing. The conclusion notes the value of the professional development experience for improving online pedagogy.

1. An Experiment in Social
Presence
A Book Chapter writing experience
with Dr. Patrick Lowenthal
Whitney Kilgore
PhD Student
University of North Texas
Spring 2014

2. Collaborative Writing
Advice for other PhD Students:
• My best learning experiences have been those I
sought out.
• After reading and citing someone for years, it is
time to meet them.
• It never hurts to ask about collaborating on a
project.
• I was humbled and honored to have the
opportunity to work with Dr. Lowenthal – he is
WONDERFUL.
• I highly recommend collaborating with others to
improve your own skills.

3. Introduction
 MOOCs draw attention to Online Learning
 Causes confusion
 Online Education is different
 Not massive, open, or video heavy
 Not all MOOCs are created equal either (c vs. x)
 Goal: Promote the Human Touch in online courses
using a cMOOC

4. Background
 Why do students drop out of online programs?
 Feelings of isolation and lonliness (Bischoff, 2000;
Croft, Dalton, & Grant, 2010; Ludwig-Hardman &
Dunlap, 2003)
 Connectivism – distributed knowledge across
connections with impacts in how we design and
deliver learning regardless of whether it builds upon
previous learning theories or is a theory on its own
(Dron, 2014; Kop & Hill, 2008).

5. Community of Inquiry
 Developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer in the
late 90’s
 The Community of Inquiry is comprised of:
 Social presence
 Teaching presence
 Cognitive presence
 The interest in social presence is partly due to its long
history dating back to the 1970s (Lowenthal, 2009)

6. The Experiment
 A MOOC built on the Community of Inquiry framework
 4 weeks long and distributed on the Canvas Open
Network
 The chapter breaks down the details of every week of
the course.

7. Method
 697 participants
 90% had a Master’s Degree or higher
 Over ½ were 50 years old or older
 56 agreed to participate in the Community of Inquiry
study
 42 female/14 male
 5 Bachelor’s/29 Master’s/22 Doctoral
 3 participants agreed to be interviewed
Survey developed by Arbaugh et al., 2008; Swan et al., 2008)

8. Social Presence
Questions

9. Results
 Scale 0-4
 where 0 = strongly disagree, 4 = strongly agree
 The social presence responses averaged (2.94)
 High marks:
 3.24 – Online communication is an excellent medium for social
interaction
 3.07 – Comfortable interacting with one another
 Low marks:
 2.68 – Comfortable disagreeing with each other
 2.76 – Getting to know others gave them a sense of belonging

10. VoiceThread Comments

11. Follow up – 6 months
later
 Themes
 The importance of effective pedagogy
 Connected to participants – still today
 They have tried to humanize their courses
 Effective learning about the human element though first
hand experience

12. Tips for Humanizing
 Create instructor introduction video to get students
interested in the content of the course and establish
instructor presence.
 Allow students to use voice or video to introduce
themselves to their classmates – develops social presence.
 Provide opportunities for social interaction and community
building inside and outside the course (i.e. twitter, google
community, LinkedIn, other).
 Have students critically analyze content for sharing with the
community of learners (curation).
 Give student feedback on assignments using voice or
video.

13. Conclusion
 Professional Development immersion
 Learned pedagogical techniques
 If it improves the students experience for ONE student
it was worth it!
 While participants did not feel comfortable disagreeing
with one another – that may be due to the duration of
the course.
 Keep offering this course

14. Our chapter is the last one in this book!