Student Perceptions of Teaching Presence, Social Presence, and Cognitive Presence in a Virtual World

摘要

Presence - or having a sense of active participation - in distance education has increasedwith the expanding use of and affordances of communications technologies. Virtualworlds have been on the forefront of popular and education technology in the last threeyears and innovative methods of teaching and learning are emerging in these contexts.Using the recently validated community of inquiry (COI) instrument, this study focuses onstudents’ perceptions of teaching, social and cognitive presence in virtual world contexts.The authors examine whether the COI Instrument can effectively be applied to virtualworld learning events. The results are exciting: in a diverse sample, virtual world learnersperceive teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence.