The community of inquiry framework identified three essential elements of cognitive, social, and teaching presences for a successful online learning experience. Among them, social presence is key for developing personal relationships and enhancing collaboration and critical discourse in online courses. This study examined whether providing more time and opportunities for interactions would increase social presence in an online course, and whether social presence would be related to learning outcomes. The findings showed that providing more interaction opportunities during a regular 16-week semester helped students develop higher social presence, group cohesion in particular, in an online course than that in an intensive 5-week online course. However, there was no relationship between social presence and learning outcomes.