The Impact of social presence during COVID-19 and the implications for learning design

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused numerous economic, health and wellbeing issues and significantly disrupted the education sector. In response to the pandemic, universities scrambled to transition from face-to-face teaching to fully online teaching practices. With many institutions being unprepared for such a transition (Jung et al., 2021" Metcalfe, 2021), educators and students faced a variety of challenges, barriers, and opportunities (Garnett, 2021). Critically, one of the opportunities provided by the pandemic was for educators to re-evaluate and re-envision learning and teaching practices (Singh et al., 2022).