To increase social presence in online communities and increase social cohesion, designers should:
- use a group member's real name for their profile
- reduce media richness

New York University

Within a Computer-mediated communication (CMC) context, social presence is the extent to which an individual is perceived as a genuine human being in communication through a medium and represents the psychological connection between people.

The greater social presence there is, the more interactions there are within the community (i.e. more engagement) leading to stronger connections, trust, and social ties between students resulting in a greater social cohesion.

Social presence in social cohesion

Altebarmakian, M., & Alterman, R. (2019, October). Design Heuristics to Support Cohesion within Online Collaborative Learning Groups. In 2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) (pp. 1-9). IEEE.

 Design Heuristics to Support Cohesion within Online Collaborative Learning Groups

Shiue, Y. C., Chiu, C. M., & Chang, C. C. (2010). Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(4), 768-777.

Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities

Improving social presence in OC

- social sharing 
- social respect
- open mind
- intimacy

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