IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/orited/v25y2025i2p106-121.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Students’ Online Social Presence?

Author

Listed:
  • Hamidreza Panjehfouladgaran

    (Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 5UG, United Kingdom)

  • Foteini Stavropoulou

    (Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 5UG, United Kingdom)

  • Misha Teimouri

    (Department of Communication, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor 43400, Malaysia)

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has affected higher education institutions worldwide as they had to switch from face-to-face to online teaching almost overnight. This abrupt change made a huge impact on teaching, learning, and particularly, student engagement. This paper focuses on online social presence as an element of student engagement, which represents how students feel under synchronous online teaching. A survey was conducted among 244 first-year students to evaluate the impact of online social interaction, online collaboration, online contact with staff, online engagement, and online active learning on online social presence. Structural equation modeling was used to test and evaluate these multivariate relationships. Our study illustrates that all variables have a significant positive relationship with online social presence. In particular, online social interaction and online collaboration show a more powerful relationship with student online social presence. Thus, digital technologies should be adopted in a way that encourages students to actively interact with their peers.

Suggested Citation

  • Hamidreza Panjehfouladgaran & Foteini Stavropoulou & Misha Teimouri, 2025. "How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Students’ Online Social Presence?," INFORMS Transactions on Education, INFORMS, vol. 25(2), pages 106-121, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orited:v:25:y:2025:i:2:p:106-121
    DOI: 10.1287/ited.2022.0054
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ited.2022.0054
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/ited.2022.0054?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:orited:v:25:y:2025:i:2:p:106-121. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.