It is widely accepted that the social capital of students – developed through their participation in learning communities – has a signif-icant impact on many aspects of the students ’ learning outcomes, such as academic performance, persistence, retention, program sat-isfaction and sense of community. However, the underlying social processes that contribute to the development of social capital are not well understood. By using the well-known Community of In-quiry (CoI) model of distance and online education, we looked into the nature of the underlying social processes, and how they relate to the development of the students ’ social capital. The results of our study indicate that the affective, cohesive and interactive facets of social presence significantly predict the network centrality mea-sures commonly used for measurement of social capital
