What is the Source of Social Capital? The Association between Social Network Position and Social Presence in Communities of Inquiry

It is widely accepted that the social capital of students – developed through their participation in learning communities – has a significant impact on many aspects of the students’ learning outcomes, such as academic performance, persistence, retention, program satisfaction 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 Inquiry (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 measures commonly used for measurement of social capital.