How Does Social Presence Affect Non-Interactive Teaching When the Audience Is a Familiar Peer?

This study investigated how different levels of social presence affect non-interactive teaching in the presence of a familiar audience. We compared three teaching conditions (video, online, and in-person) to examine whether higher levels of social presence can increase motivation and engagement, thereby improving learning outcomes. A restudy was used as the control condition. All students taught in front of a familiar peer. Results showed that social presence increased sequentially from the restudy condition to the video, online, and in-person teaching conditions. No significant differences in state anxiety or extraneous cognitive load were found among the three teaching conditions, although students in the video condition experienced significantly higher state anxiety than those in the restudy condition. Students in the in-person condition reported higher motivation, germane cognitive load, and intrinsic cognitive load than those in the restudy condition. Students in the in-person and online conditions also exhibited more happy expressions than those in the video condition. However, students in the video condition outperformed students in both the in-person and restudy conditions on the transfer test. Online teaching achieved comparable academic performance to video teaching. Social presence and motivation together mediated the positive effects of teaching activities on transfer performance (vs. restudy). These findings suggest that high social presence with a familiar audience can effectively reduce anxiety and modestly increase motivation, thereby explaining the learning advantage of teaching over restudy; however, it does not further improve, and may even hinder, learning outcomes compared to teaching with lower social presence.