Online Education & MOOCs: Teacher Self-Disclosure in Online Education and a Mediating Role of Social Presence

Abstract

: In online education, students have been observed to face a few barriers in the overall learning and experience such as absence of physical presence of the instructor, lack of instructor-student relationship, lack of student satisfaction and perceived learning. This research was conducted to study a few key variables in online education that may or may not have their effect on the perceived knowledge gain by students such as teacher self-disclosure, social presence and teacher-student relationship satisfaction. This study is significant because it will provide important variables to universities offering online courses which may assist them in enhancing the learning process. Research shows factors that will positively impact the relationship between teacher and students. Through convenience sampling technique total of 307 responses were collected through a close ended questionnaire from the students of virtual university in Karachi, Pakistan. Structural equation modeling (PLE-SEM) was used to evaluate the relation between the variables and co-relational design was used to find out the correlation between the 4 variables used in our study. The results of our study showed a positive and significant relation among all the variables, however, p value of social presence and relationship satisfaction didn?t support the relation of both variables with each other.