Teacher Presence in a Different Light: Authority Shift in Multi-user Virtual Environments

• DOI: 10.1007/s10758-020-09438-6
• Publication Date: 2020-03-26T09:03:06Z
• Authors: Irina Kuznetcova; Tzu-Jung Lin; Michael Glassman
• Keywords: 4. Education; 05 social sciences; 0503 education

Teacher presence has been considered one of the cornerstones of students’ motivation and engagement in traditional and online education. However, we argue that diminished teacher presence can actually be beneficial for building a democratic, student-led classroom. We hypothesize that this can be achieved through the use of an Open Source Educative Processes framework and what is known as multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs). Social Network Analysis was conducted to analyze student–student and student–teacher interactions in two classrooms (N = 57); one of them implemented a MUVE element (Second Life) and the other did not. The results supported the idea that diminished teacher presence can encourage students to become active and independent learning agents.