Online presence 9
(1996) offer a model in which the effect of teacher immediacy is mediated by affective
learning, which in turn is influenced by students’ attitudes about the topic.
Cognitive learning is most frequently operationalized in research on online
courses as course performance or as performance on selected student tasks. Given the
difficulties in using performances, especially where in distance education the instructor
has little or no control over when, how, or with whom a student works on a paper or
exam, and issues of grade distribution, researchers have sought for alternative measures.
Two approaches to self-assessment have been suggested as viable alternatives to grades
for measuring learning. Sanders and Wiseman (1990) proposed that cognitive learning
should be defined as how much students thought they had learned in a course. The
second self-assessment approach, one known as learning loss (Richmond, Gorham, &
McCroskey, 1987; Witt & Wheeless, 2001), measures perceived student learning as a
function of how much students thought they learned in the class subtracted from how
much they thought they would have learned from the ideal instructor. Although the focus
of these studies was on the communication behaviors of the teacher, the second research
question examines the relationships between teacher presence behaviors and cognitive
learning as well as the relationships between student perceptions of presence of both
other students and themselves and cognitive learning.
RQ2: How were perceptions of presence related to students’ cognitive learning in
the course?
Learning outcomes – affective learning
Affective learning represents the attitudes students develop about the course, the
topic, and the instructor. Although research demonstrates a consistent positive
Convention