Anyone who has been a participant in a course delivered online through some type of digitally mediated platform (e.g., Zoom or Microsoft Teams), whether as the instructor or as a student, has likely made the observation that something feels different. Yes, online classes look and function differently than being in a physical space such as a classroom. There are mute buttons to control whether your voice can be heard; video controls that allow your image to be seen or not; and breakout rooms designed for small group interactions. These components are innovative controls and features made available to users to create an environment that is conducive for teaching and learning. Over time, some of the awkward features that were inherent in early versions of these platforms have improved. For example, the occurrence of more than one person speaking at a given time has become less problematic than it once was. However, many of the challenges of online learning have been with us for a decade or more: heightened need for motivation and accountability, the potential for isolation and related mental health concerns, issues with technology implementation and access, or best practices for assessment. In 2004, Song et al. surveyed seventy-six graduate students about their views on online learning. I believe that many of the challenges they reported over twenty years ago still exist today: technical issues, lack of a sense of community, learner motivation, and effective time management (Song et al. 2004).   

Challenges and Benefits of Online Learning

Despite the steadily improving state of relevant technologies, it is easy to critique or even complain about online, digitally mediated approaches to teaching and learning. It can be frustrating when participants don’t turn on their video stream or forget they are muted when they try to speak. Nonetheless, we should acknowledge that online learning can be effective, even powerful, and can be an essential approach to making learning possible when traditional in-person methods are difficult to achieve. Online learning offers students a great deal of flexibility; it can reach users where they are and fundamentally alter any need for travel to meet at a specified time and location. This affordance can make a real difference in who gets to participate in the learning process. For that reason alone, online learning is a singularly significant and positive disruption in how education has long been conducted. 

How Physical Space Shapes Learning

For all the inherent flexibility that online learning offers to participants, it still feels different and often lesser, even deficient, compared with a more traditional version of education in which students and instructors meet in a shared, physical space. Beyond the challenges (and choices) about the video and audio options that are part and parcel online learning, I wonder what else might be creating that feeling of difference? As a professor, I feel like even my best days of teaching on Zoom are wooden and flat in comparison to when I can be in a physical space with students. There is something palpably real about being in a classroom or other physical location with a group of participants that makes the space come alive, one that possesses an atmosphere that is tangible. Is it because I can see and appreciate my students fully—meaning in three dimensions, from head to toe—without any ability to suddenly disappear at any time, like they can online? Is it because they sometimes all talk at once? Is it because they can get up and move around the physical confines of the place we inhabit? Is it because other senses beyond hearing and seeing are engaged? In her recent book, Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning, Susan Hrach states that “we are adept exploiters of our environments, including the brains and bodies of other creatures” (2021, 8). She goes on to suggest that as human beings we are psychologically, emotionally, and physically responsive to the presence of others and that this affects how we learn. Does this extend to virtual spaces, through the levels of abstraction that relevant technologies necessarily create? 

Can Virtual Reality Improve Online Education?

I think it is likely that all these possibilities (and more) are in play. For all the advances that digital communications technologies have achieved, video conferencing and online meeting spaces are still two-dimensional. Participants are still bound by the four walls of the framing of the video stream. Audio (and video) must be manually turned on. I can imagine, though, a future version that is three-dimensional, where participating feels more like playing a video game. Maybe future versions of online teaching and learning will involve wearing virtual reality headsets or digital glasses of some sort and allow users to move around and navigate an actual space that has depth and dimension. In such a version, users would be able to instantly switch from full group participation to for one-on-one or small group interactions without the need for deliberately entering a constructed scenario like a Zoom breakout room. I can imagine that the earliest iterations of such an approach would feel stilted and awkward but with refinement it seems possible that online education might be able to lose some of its current liabilities such as its flatness or its window-boxed visual access or the lack of spontaneous, natural interactions that are possible in an analog, physical environment. If online learning technologies continue to advance, is it conceivable that they will become sophisticated enough that being in an online course could feel more like being in a real-world learning space?  

Early attempts at such an evolved technology exist. Second Life quickly comes to mind as a digital platform that has been in existence for some time and that appears to be attempting to realize some of these ideas in a tangible product. Second Life leverages many of the technological advances from video gaming including three-dimensional worlds, realistic virtual avatars, the ability to inhabit and control a representative character, and high-quality audio. Compared to most video games, its purpose is open-ended—in other words, it exists without the kind of clear objective that most video games provide—which might be part of the reason that higher education was (and may still be) excited when it was first introduced. At the same time, it’s hard to pin down a clear purpose for Second Life, at least from the included descriptions on their website. Maybe that’s because the use of Second Life in higher education spaces has yet to catch on. And maybe that’s because even though the platform is quite sophisticated in many respects, it’s still not close to being a replacement for sharing a physical space with others. 

Conclusion

For me, it’s hard to imagine how advanced a technology will need to be for me to see it as appreciably different but also acceptably equivalent to what happens when I am in the same space with a group of students. I like being able to speak in front of the room and also to wander around the space to more closely examine the work my students are doing or discuss something with one of them directly. I enjoy the moments of conversational chaos that erupt unexpectedly when a topic we are discussing becomes one that clearly resonates with the group. The natural and unpredictable sounds and disruptions that often occur during class time—students deciding that they immediately need a bathroom break despite what’s happening in class or the Amtrak train that speeds by our campus multiple times a day loudly announcing its presence—may be inconvenient, but they are also part of what makes learning in a real-world context feel normal.  

The teaching and learning affordances available through online platforms are important and are already changing the potential for education in multiple ways. My hope is that there will come a time when participating in an online course is as robust and satisfying as one that takes place in a physical space. While acknowledging the flexibility, convenience, and reach that digital technologies provide to teaching and learning, I personally don’t think we are there yet. 

References 

Hrach, Susan. 2021. Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. West Virginia University Press. 

Song, Liyan, Ernise S. Singleton, Janette R. Hill, and Myung Hwa Koh. 2004. “Improving Online Learning: Student Perceptions of Useful and Challenging Characteristics.” The Internet and Higher Education 7 (1): 59-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2003.11.003  

About the Author 

Phillip Motley is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Design at Elon University, and is a seminar leader for the 2025 – 2027 Research Seminar on Learning on Location: Place-Based Pedagogies in Higher Education. His research focuses on the pedagogies of design and experiential learning, especially service-learning and social innovation. Dr. Motley is also a co-author of An Introduction to Visual Theory and Practice in the Visual Age, a co-editor of Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First Century Undergraduate Education, and has published his scholarship in peer-reviewed journals. 

How to Cite this Post  

Motley, Phillip. 2025. “Teaching and Learning Presence.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog). Elon University. May 19, 2026. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/teaching-and-learning-presence.