A Close Look at Trust Among Team Members in Online Learning Communities

Abstract

Trust is one of the important factors either fostering or damaging students' online teamwork learning experience. Building trust among team members has become a necessary step for a successful collaboration experience. The purpose of the article was to understand students' learning and teamwork experiences and further to investigate the relationships of learner-centered instructions, team trust, and social presence in an online learning community. Also, this article adds to the research on the role of social presence in promoting cognitive and affective trust. The results indicated there were positive correlations between learner-centered instructions and trust, between learner-centered instructions and social presence, and between trust and social presence. The study could provide suggestions for instructors teaching online courses for the implementation of learner-centered instructions and the importance of creating a social presence and building trust for students in a collaborative online learning environment.