Social presence, web-videoconferencing and learning in virtual teams

The possibilities of Information Technology to facilitate collaboration in education have increased considerably in recent years. Using web-videoconferencing, whereby learners in an online classroom can simultaneously collaborate using audiovisual communication tools, enlarges the learners’ ability to social and emotional expression, thereby improving communication which may increase learning satisfaction. The present study compares two cohorts of students who attended the same online course in economics where both could communicate via a discussion board and one cohort had the additional opportunity to also attend web-conferences. Contrary to our expectations, we found learning satisfaction not to increase with the introduction of web-videoconferencing. This finding leads to a number of questions for future research