Transactional Distance and College Students’ Learning Engagement in Online Learning: The Chain Mediating Role of Social Presence and Autonomous Motivation

PURPOSE: Transactional distance remains an important issue in online education, which is an important indicator to evaluate the quality of teaching and learning in online courses and is closely related to the success of learners’ online learning. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the potential mechanism of transactional distance and its three modes of interaction on the impact of learning engagement of college students. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: Online Education Student Interaction Scale, Online Social Presence Questionnaire, Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-Student scales were used, revised questionnaire for cluster sampling of college students, 827 valid samples. SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 24.0 were used for analysis, and Bootstrap method was used to test the significance level of the mediating effect. RESULTS: Transactional distance (including the three interaction modes) was significantly and positively related to college students’ learning engagement. Autonomous motivation played a chain mediating role between transactional distance and learning engagement. In addition, social presence and autonomous motivation mediated the chain between student-student and student-teacher interaction on learning engagement. In addition, however, student-content interactions did not significantly impact social presence, and the chain mediating effect of social presence and autonomous motivation between student-content interaction and learning engagement was not supported. CONCLUSION: Based on transactional distance theory, this study reveals the role of transactional distance on college students’ learning engagement and the mediating effect of social presence and autonomous motivation in the relationship between transactional distance (and three interaction modes of transactional distance) on college students’ learning engagement. This study supports the findings of additional online learning research frameworks and empirical studies to enhance our understanding of how online learning affects college students’ learning engagement and the important role of online learning in college student’s academic development.