Social Presence, Satisfaction, and Learning Outcomes in an Undergraduate Computer Programming Distance Course

Abstract

This study investigated the social presence, satisfaction and learning outcomes of undergraduate students based on their participation in an emergency remote online course entitled “Educational Programming Environments” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instruction was delivered using a student-centered design and discovery learning to teach computer programming problem solving. Data were collected from 39 students who did not undertake prior preparation for engaging in distance education. Social presence, learning outcomes and satisfaction towards the course were measured by previous well-established scales, respectively. The students’ learning outcomes were evaluated through their code development. At the end of the course, the students filled out an online questionnaire which measured these three variables. The results of this study showed that all three variables were evaluated as satisfactory by the students. The results also indicated that social presence and code development were positively associated with satisfaction. Moreover, the results of the regression analysis indicated that social presence and code development were critical factors affecting students’ satisfaction. Together, these two factors explain 39.9% of the variance of satisfaction. Social presence alone contributed about 32.3% of this variance, suggesting that it may be very important in predicting satisfaction. This study could prove useful to instructors in understanding which factors may influence the design and implementation of distance learning in higher education. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG