مجید ربانی

The concept of social presence is defined as the ability of learners to identify the learning community, have a sense of belonging to the community and communicate purposefully in a learning community. The reason for emphasizing the social presence of online learning is that online and virtual learning experts believe that social constructivism is an important factor in promoting interpersonal communication and the quality of learning. Given the importance of social presence as an influential variable in the process of virtual education, it is necessary to pay more attention to this issue and its predictors. In this regard, the present study aimed to provide a causal model for predicting social presence based on cognitive presence mediated by the online learning atmosphere. Participants included 265 students of online courses of Payame Noor universities in North Khorasan province in the academic year of 2009-2010 who were selected by cluster random sampling method. In order to measure the research variables, questionnaires of cognitive presence, social presence and online learning atmosphere were used. Amos software and path analysis method were used to evaluate the proposed model. The results showed that, 1-According to the above findings, the proposed model in the RMSEA index (root mean square of estimation errors) does not fit well, so the model was modified by correlating latent variable errors and The results showed that the final model has a good fit; 2-Cognitive presence has a direct, positive and significant relationship with social presence (P≤0.05 and β=0.62); There is a direct, positive and significant relationship between cognitive presence and online learning (P≤0.05 and β= 0.14) and also a direct relationship between online learning atmosphere and social presence is positive and significant (P≤0.05 and β=0.32); 3-In the indirect way, with the presence of mediator variables, the relationship between cognitive presence and social presence was still significant and the online learning atmosphere absorbs part of the effect of cognitive presence on social presence and mediates this relationship in part .