The Centrality of Social Presence in Online Teaching and Learning in Social Work

Abstract

Social presence is the extent to which persons are perceived to be real and are able to be authentically known and connected to others in mediated communication. A full appreciation of the concept offers social work educators an antidote to skepticism of online learning and provides an avenue for modeling the development and maintenance—indeed, the transformation—of collaborative helping relationships essential to practice. This article opens with a discussion of the place of social presence in its larger conceptual, theoretical, and empirical context and presents identified components along with concrete examples for effectively building social presence into online teaching. We conclude with a discussion of real-world challenges and tensions and pose a series of questions for future research.