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Teacher Presence in a Different Light: Authority Shift in Multi-user Virtual Environments

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Abstract

Teacher presence has been considered one of the cornerstones of students’ motivation and engagement in traditional and online education. However, we argue that diminished teacher presence can actually be beneficial for building a democratic, student-led classroom. We hypothesize that this can be achieved through the use of an Open Source Educative Processes framework and what is known as multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs). Social Network Analysis was conducted to analyze student–student and student–teacher interactions in two classrooms (N = 57); one of them implemented a MUVE element (Second Life) and the other did not. The results supported the idea that diminished teacher presence can encourage students to become active and independent learning agents.

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Notes

  1. One of the reasons teacher presence is treated as more of a problem than social (peer-to-peer) presence might be because while teacher immediacy was originally a concept developed in face-to-face settings, social presence originated as a way of understanding distance communications (e.g., telephones).

  2. Here was are referring to the idea that both face to face and online education can use one of three information networks (Glassman 2016; Glassman and Kang 2016): centralized, in which the teacher acts as the primary nodes (or hub) of information in the classroom network with direct links to individual students (teachers provides information to student, student provides responses to teacher through papers, tests, etc.). Decentralized networks, where there are multiple information hubs servicing different smaller networks. Distributed networks, where each node (at least potentially) has equal status. We suggest teacher directed classrooms are primarily centralized networks of information, are sometimes decentralized networks (e.g. teacher picks their best students as “sub-teachers”) but they are almost never distributed information networks.

  3. A third possibility for a category of teacher presence in online contexts is direct instruction. We argue with this one on the basis of two points. One is that direct instruction is not mentioned in the teacher presence literature focusing on in-person classrooms. The second is a two-factor analysis done by Shea (2006).

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  1. The Ohio State University, 1945 North High Street, Columbus, OH, 43210-1172, USA

    Irina Kuznetcova, Tzu-Jung Lin & Michael Glassman

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  1. Irina Kuznetcova
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Kuznetcova, I., Lin, TJ. & Glassman, M. Teacher Presence in a Different Light: Authority Shift in Multi-user Virtual Environments. Tech Know Learn 26, 79–103 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-020-09438-6

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