Social närvaro på distansprogram : En kvantitativ studie av hur den förändras över tid

Sammanfattning: This study is about investigating how distance students experience the sense of social presence over time and if there are differences between distance with physical meets and IT distances without physical meeting as a study form. A web survey was sent to 564 students on semesters 1, 3 and 5 who were registered at a distance program at Mid University. Students either read a program remotely with meetings or IT-distances without meetings. An analysis of non-response bias was conducted which showed that there are no significant differences between the response group and the loss. A collapse of the two groups resulted in a response rate of 30.7%. The study shows that the sense of social presence increases from semesters 1 to semesters 3 before it drops to semesters 5. The results of the survey also show that there are significant differences between how distance and IT-distance experience the sense of social presence. There are no significant differences between semesters and study form over time as the students experience the sense of social presence. What we can see is that the mean values show that distance students have a higher average value of social presence than IT distance students. The result shows that there are differences in how students feel that they create and retain the sense of social presence during their study time. IT-distance have a greater sense of creating and maintaining the sense of social presence than distance students.