A Study of Online Presence in Digital Learning Environments Research-in-Progress

Online courses are popular in the United States. In particular, the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platform such as Coursera and edX are used to deliver online courses exclusively. Although these courses often do not provide any college level credits or degrees, scores of people have already joined the courses and finished them. Many schools are struggling to incorporate online modalities into their curricula. Often they do not have enough resources to develop and deliver the online courses. In addition, delivered online courses are not as promising as expected, not just because the resources are lacking, but because they have different modalities from traditional classroom based courses. In this study, we proposed a model of relationship between online presence and student learning outcomes. By identifying the proper measures of online presence, instructors can not only pass on their knowledge, but also drastically improve the learning experience for their students.