Surinder and I are currently conducting research on the use of online media such as virtual worlds for education and training. In my readings I came across an interesting article about the perceptions of social presence, or the feeling of being with others in an online environment, and perceived learning and satisfaction in an online course. In this study, researchers measured student perceptions of social presence and perceived learning and satisfaction with an online course and found significant correlations. Students who reported higher perceived social presence also perceived that they learned more than those who perceived lower levels of social presence. Students with higher perceived social presence were also more satisfied with their instructor overall. The limitations of the research and the paper have to be considered when making inferences from these results, such as the fact that we can’t infer causation from correlations, and the fact that all of the data used was perceptual and self-reported by the students. However, I still found the results quite interesting because the researchers looked not only at overall levels of perceived social presence and perceived learning, but also at each of these things based on the learning activity (e.g. discussions, team projects, lectures, written assignments). As might be expected, the correlation between social presence and perceived learning was highest among group oriented activities such as discussion and group projects, but statistically significant correlations were found for all activities, including lectures, notes and readings. It seems to imply that social presence has an impact on the students’ perceived outcomes of the course even for activities that are completed individually.

What might this mean for virtual teams and virtual team leaders? I am careful to make too large a leap from this research to best practices for virtual teams, however,  a virtual team working under a leader, may have similar outcomes. That would mean that perceived social presence could have a large impact on team outcomes like satisfaction or perceived learning, especially in situations where the team is trying to understand new concepts or project objectives. This seems to have been a theme throughout some conversations Surinder and I have had with people who use virtual worlds regularly to conduct team meetings. Although the teams might encounter technological issues with using and running a virtual world, many users cite the sense of presence and being with others as one of the benefits of using the virtual world to conduct the majority of team meetings as opposed to other tools available such as a team wiki, instant messaging, or email. It is not realistic at this point for all virtual teams to use virtual worlds all the time, but it might be more important than originally conceived for virtual team leaders to engender a sense of social presence amongst distant team members regardless of the task type. One way that this can be done is to ensure that there is some sort of shared object that team members are working on together. A shared work space can add to social presence as well, such as shared documents stored on a shared group website from which team members can work.