The Interplay between Teaching Presence and Cognitive Presence in Online Discussion Forum: Evidence from Online Writing Classes

Abstract

Students’ interaction with the teacher is essential to scaffold students’ knowledge and cognition. However, in an online learning program, such interaction was minimum, making the learning process becomes more challenging. This study explored the students and teacher’ s interaction in four discussion forums in writing classes conducted online. Deploying the Community of Inquiry framework, this study aimed to find out the aspects of teaching presence appear in the forum, to examine the phases of cognitive presence that students engaged in the online discussion forums, and to determine which aspects of teaching presence that trigger the cognitive presence. Results indicated that (i) all of the teaching presence aspects were found in the overall discussion forums, (ii) three phases of cognitive presence (triggering event, exploration, and integration) were found in the overall discussion forums, and (iii) direct instruction was found to be the main trigger of teaching presence that promote the phases of cognitive presence to the exploration and integration phases.