TY - JOUR TI - Affordances of community of inquiry methods in measuring and evaluating teaching presence to guide practice DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T34171FK PY - 2018 AB - The Community of Inquiry (COI) model’s construct of teaching presence provides a useful framework for understanding the practice-based requirements of effective online instruction. Teaching presence consists of instructor practice related to instructional design, direct instruction, facilitating discourse, and assessment of student work for the purpose of realizing educationally worthwhile outcomes. Providers of online continuing professional development courses may benefit from focusing on teaching presence to evaluate and improve practice. Two primary COI methods are used for measuring teaching presence in online courses: content analysis and student surveys. The purpose of this study was to compare the relative advantages of each method to guide improvements to practice. The mixed methods case study research design collected data on teaching presence in five online, instructor-led professional development courses. A sample of 26 students was surveyed to capture their reflections on the types and amounts of teaching presence they perceived in the courses. A content analysis was undertaken in two of the five courses to identify and tabulate instances of teaching presence in course content. Findings included that content analysis methods captured the quantity and location of teaching presence in the analyzed courses and made a useful distinction between teaching presence related to instructional design as compared to instructor-student interactions. Content analysis limitations included its focus on quantity and not quality. Pre- and post-course rubrics were proposed as a more practical approximation of the content analysis method. The student survey was found to capture student perceptions of the presence and quality of teaching presence. The student survey also had the advantage of an absolute scale to identify aspects of teaching presence in need of improvement. A shortened student survey was proposed to include only items for which student perceptions would be most appropriate. Two products were developed to support the transition of COI methods to professional development settings: a Teaching Presence Evaluation Toolkit with rubric and student survey measurement tools designed for program administrators, and an online course, Improving Teaching Presence in Online Courses, for instructors to learn best practices for the expression of teaching presence. KW - Design of Learning Contexts KW - Distance education LA - eng ER -