Social presence enhances student performance in an online geology course but depends on instructor facilitation

AbstractOnline courses can feel isolating and sometimes lack human connections that can motivate students. We developed a fully online geoscience course to build a ‘Community of Inquiry’ with attention to cognitive, social, and teaching presences. We ran the course using nearly identical materials for 8 semesters (recorded video lectures, labs, assignments, and assessments). Slight variations in instructor behavior caused profound impacts on student performance, creating a natural experiment to isolate factors that influence student performance. During semesters that instructors sent fewer course announcements and provided less feedback to students, about 50% more students earned D’s and F’s than semesters with frequent interactions. These performance drops correlated with drops in key indicators of social presence such as the number of students who thought the instructor knew their name. We developed an instrument to quantify student perceptions about the strength of student-student and instructor-studen...