Abstract
Online course instructors’ perceptions and perspectives regarding their teaching presence as a key presence in online learning environments significantly influence, if not determine, their online teaching practices, which in turn influence the quality of online students’ learning experiences. Although gaining deeper insights into online course instructors’ perceptions and experiences of teaching presence is quite important and valuable for online education, there is still limited qualitative inquiry into this critical presence across diverse online teaching contexts. The purpose in this qualitative, multiple case study was to explore and understand online course instructors’ perceptions and experiences regarding their own presence in their online courses. We explored the perceptions and experiences of eight course instructors teaching undergraduate and graduate-level online courses at a midwestern U.S. college. Our findings indicated that teaching presence was uniformly considered important and necessary by the instructors although their applications and priorities regarding their teaching presence varied. We discussed our themes that emerged from our interview data and offered several theoretical and practical implications regarding teaching presence in online learning environments.
Highlights
Online course instructors’ perceptions and perspectives regarding their teaching presence as a key presence in online learning environments significantly influence, if not determine, their online teaching practices, which in turn influence the quality of online students’ learning experiences
While we acknowledge that teaching presence within the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework is not limited to course instructors only but can rather be distributed across teachers, students, and course materials, for the specific purpose and questions of our study, we focused on teaching presence behaviors, roles, and responsibilities fulfilled by online course instructors (Richardson et al, 2015)
We believe that different experiences of teaching presence by online course instructors can expand our understanding of teaching presence and its dimensions in online learning environments
Summary
Online course instructors’ perceptions and perspectives regarding their teaching presence as a key presence in online learning environments significantly influence, if not determine, their online teaching practices, which in turn influence the quality of online students’ learning experiences. Exploration of teaching presence directly from online course instructors’ perspectives is critical because researchers may gain a deeper and more thorough understanding of the nature and implications of teaching presence in online learning environments (Orcutt & Dringus, 2017) This qualitative case study was informed by the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework developed by Garrison et al (2000) as a product of their empirical inquiries into asynchronous text-based computer conferences in higher education.
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