Investigating the enactment of social presence in blended adult education

ABSTRACT

Background

While open-cohort blended education programmes allow for accessible and flexible study trajectories, they may present social challenges to learners. Social presence is a possible a way of enhancing adult learners’ success. It can lead to an increased perception of community, which may result in lower rates of dropping out.

Purpose

This study investigates how social presence may be enacted in blended adult education programmes with open cohorts. The paper reports on the first phase of a design-based research study focused on programme-level strategies to establish social presence. This includes three distinct phases: (1) a contextual analysis and jointly agreed problem setting, (2) a literature review to identify and develop social presence strategies, grounded in theory, and (3) a qualitative study to scrutinise the perceptions of adult learners and programme coordinators regarding the embedding of the social presence strategies in the ecological setting.

Method

Based on a review of the literature that addressed the strategies to enact facets of social presence, three intervention scenarios for practice were elaborated. These were deliberately specified at the programme level – hence encompassing multiple separate courses. Each intervention scenario proposed activities carried out by particular actors, at particular time points during a programme, by means of a certain medium and targeting a certain group size. Each intervention scenario was systematically assessed by means of semi-structured interviews with adult learners and programme coordinators, using an approach based on Kano matrices.

Findings

The analysis indicated that learners and programme coordinators were not in favour of a series of programme-wide interventions which lead to enactment of social presence. However, the study also showed they were, though, in favour of shared course-related experiences. Although there were contradictory perceptions among learners and staff, the allocation of time and the compulsory nature of social presence activities seemed to be decisive factors.

Conclusions

This study highlights that it is crucial to assess the perceptions of the full range of stakeholders prior to an intervention, in order to establish shared priorities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social presence
• adult education programmes
• blended learning
• learning community
• dropout
• online learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT) through its grant (N° 140029) for Strategic Basic Research (SBO) in the Adult Learners Online! (ALO) project.