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This research experimentally manipulated the social presence cues in instructor's messages to students. The context was an online professional development one-credit course with one-to-one mentoring of students. Additionally, student learning intentions and levels of trust were examined as factors that may mitigate the effects of social presence. Results indicate that social presence affects the learner's interactions and perception of the instructor but has no effect on perceived learning, satisfaction, engagement, or the quality of their final course product. These findings suggest social presence is a correlational rather than a causal variable associated with student learning. Exploratory analyses suggest that trust and learning intentions are potentially important factors impacting student perceptions of the learning environment and performance in the course respectively. Distance education has a long and venerable history in providing educational opportunities to those who cannot come to a campus. Recently, the emergence of

Using cluster analysis this study investigated the characteristics of learning strategies learners use in online courses with one-on-one mentoring. Three distinct approaches were identified: ''Mastery oriented'', ''Task focused'' and ''Minimalist in effort''. Despite the widespread concern that students will have difficulty managing their time in online courses with high level of student freedom, this study found that the vast majority of learners were very effective in their learning strategies. The findings speak well for the potential of distance education environments to provide high quality self-paced learning, accommodating different learning strategies, which is difficult to do in grouppaced courses. We further explored how these approaches relate to and interact with, participants' background and their levels of satisfaction and self reported learning.

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