Exploring teaching presence in both online and face-to-face learning environments

The advent of technology mediated learning has given rise to significant change in understanding a traditionally established concepts and definitions for learning environments in the higher education. This paper focuses on the Community of Inquiry Model (COI) as a conceptual framework for assessing teachers´ roles in technology based learning setting. Specifically, this paper explores student´s perception of COI´s teaching presence component a in both: online and face-to-face type of course. Sample for this study consisted from undergraduate students (N=561) enrolled in Food Science class at the large Midwestern university (USA). Results from the study revealed that student´s equally perceived the level of teaching presence regardless of type of learning environment. The author´s argue that these findings provide evidence toward future research to expand the conceptualization of the Community of Inquiry Model to include differing learning populations.