Introduction to the Literature

Abstract: Higher Education administrators and educators seek to understand how to design and to facilitate online courses to ensure quality, culturally responsive online education for minority students, specifically African American students, and to close the academic achievement gap that exists today. This study examines online students ’ using both synchronous and asynchronous technologies to determine whether students ’ social presence, cognitive presence, teacher presence, and perceived learning differ based upon ethnicity. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted. Results yielded no significant difference in dependent variables based on ethnicity