Social Presence in Times of COVID-19 Distance Teaching

This paper presents a qualitative research study at an Austrian teacher training university. After having a look at the basic terms of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and the concept of social presence, the study which was carried out from April to November 2020 is presented. Pre-service teachers were interviewed at two points of time (spring and fall 2020) about their experience with regards to switching all courses to Emergency Remote Teaching (which means changing from classroom teaching to online-teaching due to Covid-19 regulations). The interviews focused on the experience of social presence which means the perception of other people (university teachers and students) as individuals. The results show that students experienced changing to distance teaching as quite positive at the beginning. However, they suffered from lack of synchronous exchange. This is especially due to the fact that not all university teachers could cope with ERT and were not tangible for the students. Although the results are not representative, they give some interesting insight into the conditions under which online learning can be successful.