Each category of a tutor’s presence is vital to learning and to the establishment of the learning community; tutors' behavior must be such that they are seen to be “posting regularly, responding in a timely manner and modeling good online communication and interaction” (Palloff & Pratt, 2003, p.118). Without an instructor’s explicit guidance and “teaching presence,” students were found to engage primarily in “serial monologues” (Pawan et al., 2003). Baker (2004) discovered that “instructor immediacy, i.e., teaching presence (Rourke et al., 1999), was a more reliable predictor of effective cognitive learning than whether students felt close to each other. Studies have demonstrated that instructor participation in threaded discussion is critical to the development of social presence (Shea, Li, Swan, & Pickett, 2005; Swan & Shih, 2005) and sometimes not fully appreciated by online faculty (Liu, Bonk, Magjuka, Lee, & Su, 2005). Shea, Li, and Pickett (2006) proposed that teaching presence – viewed as the core role of the online instructor – is a promising mechanism for developing learning community in online environments.
Heather Kurto on 06 Jun 13z, 'Colleges and universities ought to be concerned not with how fast they can "put their courses on the Web" but with finding out how this technology can be used to build and sustain learning communities' (1998, p. 7). Furthermore, the world's increasing dependence on lifelong access to new knowledge is transforming the landscape of higher education and forcing the academy to rethink virtually all of its systems and traditions (Rowly et al., 1998).
