The impact of role assignment on social presence in online discussions: A mixed-method study

This paper examines the effect of role assignment strategy on undergraduate students' social presence in asyn-chronous online discussions. Asynchronous online discussion activities were designed and implemented in an educational technology course. In the experimental groups, participants engaged in online discussion activities designed with the role assignment strategy to support social presence using specific roles (starter, moderator, or summarizer) while the control group participants completed the discussion activities without using the role assignment strategy. Results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the social presence levels of the experimental group and the control group. Qualitative content analysis of the discussion posts revealed that there were more social presence indicators in the posts of the participants who were assigned roles compared to the ones who did not have roles.