Trends in the application of technology in education have been evolving over the past decades. One factor that has been examined independently by considering the aspects of technology and education is identifying the main channels of technology development in education and examining the mutual role of teacher and learner in technology-based education. This trend of technology advancement in education, which includes learning management systems, social media, virtual reality, augmented reality, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, MOOCs, simulators, and gamification, is expected to continue. However, the most important consideration is the quality of presence in online learning and teaching platforms (Xieling, Di, Gary& Haoran, 2020). Despite all the development, there are still significant issues, particularly in not paying attention to people's emotional aspects in an online learning environment. The findings show that the use of emotional components in the online classroom is essential for successful learning involvement. Recognizing learners' needs and emotions and paying attention to them as autonomous individuals with human idetities, is commonly disregarded in studies on online course design (Novakowski, 2020). People with human identities and feelings are not introduced to an online learning system; instead, they are presented as a name or a number, which is a major challenge in virtual education. The foundations of the community of inquiry that Garrison (2001) introduced helped achieve success in e-learning, whose validity was confirmed by different studies. (Rourke, Kanuka, 2009, Akyol & Garrison ,2011; Garrison ,2017; Yildirim, Seferoğlu,2021). Community of Inquiry includes cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. Cognitive presence means "Are the thoughts and ideas of individuals in the community influential? Does the exchange of ideas of individuals in the community make meaning?" In other words, critical exploration is one of the main features of cognitive presence (Garrison, 2017; Rourke et al., 2009). Social presence is defined as the ability of individuals to present their characteristics in society and the ability to belong to a group, so presenting themselves as "real people" to other users. Studies by Géraldine, Sawsen (2020) and Giesbers et al. (2013), and Caspi et al. (2006) have shown that people need to create a social learning environment to participate in critical discourse in integrated online environments. The third component of the community of inquiry framework is the presence of teaching. Garrison (2017) outlined three main teacher roles that affect teaching presence in integrated and online environments, including designing learning and organizing environments, facilitating discourse and learning guidance. According to Reinties et al., )2012(and Rourke and Canoca, )2009), Before beginning an online course, a teacher can design, organize, and plan a rich learning environment by determining learning goals, processes, and interactive activities, as well as determining manners and criteria of behavior in an online and integrated environment, learning outcomes, assessment, and evaluation strategies. Learners can learn and interact with their peers with a wide range of materials in this rich environment. For this reason, a teacher can facilitate discourse or design guidelines to encourage critical exploration. In 2011, a study called metacognition assessment in the online community of inquiry was conducted by Garrison. Aspects of the community of inquiry theory were considered as influential components on metacognitive levels in an online relationship. Metacognitive dimensions included self-regulation, organization, and self-efficacy.
According to Garrison (2017), "Facilitating discourse throughout the course is crucial to maintaining students' interest, motivation, and involvement for active learning. Cleveland-Innes and Campbell (2012) studied emotional presence, learning, and the online learning environment. They proposed a fourth dimension to the community of inquiry. Emotional presence was introduced as one of the dimensions of presence in the virtual learning environment (Stenbom et al., 2016). However, recent research showed that a fourth category, emotional presence, is needed to complete the community of inquiry framework. Every user in online education has experienced unpleasant feelings such as insecurity, fear of disconnection, a sense of anonymity. (You et al. 2014; Giesbers et al. 2013). Online contexts may make it difficult for peers and teachers to identify users' emotions (Cotterall,2013). Cleveland-Innes and Campbell (2012) defined emotional presence as: "The outward expression of emotions and its effects by individuals and among individuals in the community of inquiry, as learners interact with learning technology, course content, peers and teachers." According to Stenbom et al. (2016) 's research, Garrison's community of inquiry model was modified by adding the component "emotional presence." the community of inquiry with four presence components, cognitive, social, educational, and emotional components. Figure 1 shows the theoretical dimensions of the community of inquiry. As shown, the emotional presence dimension includes emotional perception and emotional response.
In 2021, the results of a study entitled Exploring learners' emotions and emotional profiles in simulation-based medical education showed that in a virtual environment, education with emotional load could be designed. Simulation-based learning in a virtual environment mainly reinforces positive emotions and reduces negative ones) Tuulikki,2021(. Therefore, designing a learning environment provides a platform for students to share their emotions. Expressing, identifying, and reinforcing emotions helps teachers understand students' concerns and unpleasant situations. Teachers who know their students' motivations and their sensitive emotions can use this information to enhance the learning process. In addition, teachers' behavior, teaching methods, and assessment can activate certain chains of emotion in the learner and affect the quality of learning) Giesbers et al., 2013; Daniels et al. 2012; Tuulikki,2021(. Teacher behavior has a significant impact on student learning results. The teacher should examine the aspects that affect students' performance during the teaching and learning process, such as communicating, providing a learning atmosphere, teaching style, and teaching methods. (Haskar-Hernandez et al., 2020). Inference, engagement, exploration, explanation, expansion, evaluation, and generalization are the seven learning cycles developed (Sarac, 2018). Perception of emotions as mental experiences depends on the context they arise. These identities are experienced in different situations and have many functions in the learning environment. Suppose we assume that learning contains seven stages of reasoning, engaging, exploring, explaining, expanding, evaluating, and generalizing. In that case, the seven learning cycles are reasoning, engaging, exploring, explaining, expanding, evaluating, and generalizing (Sarac, 2018).). People's emotions play a role in these seven dimensions of learning. In other words, emotions can be used to improve reasoning, engaging, exploring, explaining, expanding, evaluating, and generalizing in the field of learning so that relationships between concepts or ideas can be more easily established. Decision-making and problem-solving efficiency can be improved. Meanwhile, emotional learning involves discovering skills to identify and manage emotions, creating attention and interest in others, making responsible decisions, building positive relationships and effectively managing challenging situations (Fidekis, 2016). In recent years, research in the field of emotional awareness in learning has focused on investigating the effects of academic emotions (environment, anxiety, pride, anger, hope, hope, hope, failure, comfort, fatigue, hopelessness) on thinking and processing information. Self-regulated learning is recognized as a critical factor for successful online learning. Emotions and cognition are interrelated; students' perceived emotions are important antecedents of self-regulated learning. In the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning in online learning, perceived emotions, enjoyment, worry, and boredom are important. Control and self-regulation are linked to perceived emotions. Perceived emotions such as enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom are associated with control and self-regulation (You et al., 2014).
West et al., (2020) showed that designing an aesthetic learning environment significantly affects an individual's emotional response. Positive emotions, such as the learner's interest, attention, participation, and motivation, lead to curiosity, active learning, self-regulation, and deep information processing. Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to the learners' emotional state. In addition to having a profound effect on emotions, aesthetics profoundly impacts the cognitive aspects of learning. Visual elements in aesthetics are more effective than beautification in conveying messages, improving communication, better understanding, and supporting pervasive cognitive processing.
The term "emotional response" refers to the process of observing a teacher's reaction to a student's behaviors and feelings after determining their emotional state. The main purpose of emotional feedback is to motivate the respondent, facilitate their learning process, and improve their mood. In particular, the teacher should encourage active learning and participatory knowledge structure, provide appropriate models and expression styles between individuals, and monitor, especially in discussing negative emotions often difficult to convey correctly.
More dopamine is released when the brain receives a reward, leading to a stronger connection between those newly activated nerve cells. These connections create a repository of successful procedures that will be called in the future. At the same time, dopamine secretion stimulates positive feelings (such as happiness), and motivation rises. The learner must receive immediate feedback within a few seconds of completing the action for the reward system to be engaged. On the other hand, environmental influences such as blaming, mocking other students, looking down on sensitive people, or even trying too hard to calm down after a failed activity can lead to bad consequences (Arndt, 2012). The instructor risks being a lifeless entity with little functionality to rejuvenate and improve the learning experience in an online setting. Learners have high expectations for communicating with their coaches and classmates, and they do not want to be passive when using various media. They want active participation and emotional engagement to manipulate the environment and experience a degree of emotion and interaction with learning objects in the online environment. Forming small groups provides an opportunity for students to commit to their colleagues and allow learners to solve the problem collectively. Teamwork promotes positive interdependence, social skills, verbal interaction, individual responsibility, and group processing. In fact, part of the educational design and presentation work includes providing opportunities to strengthen cognitive capacities along with social and emotional capacities that can be enhanced through the use of art and aesthetic presence. This study investigates the environment based on emotional presence in virtual education. In other words, it attempts to strengthen the emotional presence in the virtual classroom with proper planning and determine the relationship between the teacher's emotional feedback and the learner's emotional understanding.