How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Students’ Online Social Presence?

Hamidreza Panjehfouladgaran (), Foteini Stavropoulou () and Misha Teimouri ()
Additional contact information
Hamidreza Panjehfouladgaran: Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 5UG, United Kingdom
Foteini Stavropoulou: Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 5UG, United Kingdom
Misha Teimouri: Department of Communication, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor 43400, Malaysia

INFORMS Transactions on Education, 2025, vol. 25, issue 2, 106-121

Abstract: The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has affected higher education institutions worldwide as they had to switch from face-to-face to online teaching almost overnight. This abrupt change made a huge impact on teaching, learning, and particularly, student engagement. This paper focuses on online social presence as an element of student engagement, which represents how students feel under synchronous online teaching. A survey was conducted among 244 first-year students to evaluate the impact of online social interaction, online collaboration, online contact with staff, online engagement, and online active learning on online social presence. Structural equation modeling was used to test and evaluate these multivariate relationships. Our study illustrates that all variables have a significant positive relationship with online social presence. In particular, online social interaction and online collaboration show a more powerful relationship with student online social presence. Thus, digital technologies should be adopted in a way that encourages students to actively interact with their peers.

Keywords: online student engagement; online social presence; online learning; higher education; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ited.2022.0054 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orited:v:25:y:2025:i:2:p:106-121

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in INFORMS Transactions on Education from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().