Journal of Knowledge Management, Economics and Information Technology

Virtual Internet communities have emerged that feature cross-platform, interactive, diversified, and personalized functions, enabling members to share ideas, interests, information, feelings, knowledge, and experiences with other members in a lifelike environment. In this study, we investigated how a sense of virtual community is formed in the online environments where users communicate and build interpersonal relationships. We adopted a questionnaire survey method, selecting Wretch users as the study participants. We analyzed 196 valid questionnaires using structural equation modeling. The results revealed that a positive relationship existed between social presence and sense of virtual community and between naturalness (an element of social presence) and membership status, community support, and sense of attachment (elements of sense of virtual community). Objectivity (an element of social presence) only exhibited a positive relationship with membership status and community support (elements of sense of virtual community). According to these results, we offered a reference for future studies.

  Influence of Social Presence on Sense of Virtual Community (967.6 KiB, 2,191 hits)

Today’s using of virtual learning environments becomes more remarkable in education. The potential of virtual learning environments has frequently been related to the expansion of sense of social presence which is obtained from students and educators. This study investigated the effectiveness of social presence within virtual learning environments and analysed the impact of social presence on increasing learning satisfaction within virtual learning environments. Second Life, as an example of virtual learning environments considered as a learning medium to examine the feeling of social presence in students’ learning activities which adopted for this study. First objective is to identify the importance of social presence to increase learning satisfaction, and second is to examine students’ perception of social presence in virtual learning environments. The descriptive study was conducted among 40 students participated to the virtual course in Second Life. The result indicated social presence is an essential part of learning in virtual learning environments in meeting students’ learning satisfaction. It was also discovered that perceiving high feeling of social presence is affected by different specifications of virtual learning environments. In conclusion this study presents the finding and discusses some implication for lecturers, online course designers, and researchers are increasingly investigating the use of virtual environments for online learning.

  Enhancing Learning within the 3-D Virtual Learning Environment (681.7 KiB, 2,522 hits)