Virtual Learning Communities In The Social Sense Of Presence

Virtual learning community provide a constructive circumstance for learners to social intercommunicate. Its aim is to improve learning performance. Intense social presence will lead to a high level of ascription and cohesion, and then promote transmission of information, support learning, teamwork and the satisfaction of learning. So it is necessary for us to create and promote the social presence to improve learning performance.This research firstly focuses on the theory about virtual learning community and social presence. It aims to reveal their essence, characters, studying status and limitation of both of them. In order to understand what are user's motivations, perceptions and if there are any differences among different media. This survey conducts a study by select some postgraduates coming from six different universities to evaluate the user's needs. As a result, there are 139 valid questionnaires in this study. We analyse this data by using SPSS 11.0 for Windows.From the study, we have drawn a conclusion that as for motivations, a factor analysis revealed the most important motivation to use community websites is information. We can improve the social presence by meeting the user's needs. As for social presence, a factor analysis has revealed four aspects: interaction, sincerity, intimacy and cooperation. Then we specifically analyse the factors of personal psychology , the influence of group to individual and the users' interaction, communication and cooperation, etc.. These factors influence social presence, and they are also influenced by social presence.