The effects of controlling learning environments and instructor intervention on learners’ social presence and critical thinking

Jamie Costley
Kongju National University
Gongju, South Korea

Understanding how learners behave in asynchronous learning environments is becoming more important as the use of online learning becomes ubiquitous. Two important measures of learner discourse are the concepts of social presence and critical thinking. These two constructs measure the degree to which learners are engaging cognitively and affectively online. This paper investigates how a certain type of instructional design — control over the environment — and types of instructor intervention affect both social presence and critical thinking. This research took online posts from 217 teacher trainees using an online forum as part of their coursework and measured the levels of social presence and critical thinking in their posts. Nine hunred posts were collected from nine different experimental conditions that varied in the levels of instructor control and instructor posting types within them. Analysis of the learners’ posts showed that increases in instructor control over the learning environment, and instructor posts containing direct instruction, increase critical thinking levels in the learners’ discourse. On the other hand, social presence was higher when there were lower levels of instructor control and instructor posts focused on facilitating the discourse. These results are useful in that they give some insight into how teachers using asynchronous online forums can change the type of discourse learners will produce based on how the teacher sets up and intervenes in the learning environment.