Developing a Social Presence Scale for Measuring Students' Involvement during e-Learning Process

One of the challenges that online learners face is feeling of isolation and diminishing desire of maintaining active participation during e-learning. Social presence, that is considered to be a vital factor in e-learning, is recently started to receive a support from the field. Although research indicated a significant role of social presence in both learning process and learning outcome, there is no widely accepted measurement scale of social presence. This study, therefore, developed a new scale to measure social presence based on the existing theories and validated it against 723 participants. Nineteen self-report items with three dimensions, co-presence, influence, and cohesiveness, were identified and validated using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) in a preliminary and a follow-up study.