Investigating Teaching Presence in Blended Learning Environments: an institutional case study at a university in Northwest Mexico.

Abstract

Blended learning has emerged in the context of new learning environments and pedagogies offering its potential for maximising the effectiveness of contemporary teaching and learning. If full advantage is taken of technology, there are opportunities to trigger new relationships among the teacher, the learner and the educational context. However, to achieve this, the use of technology must be re-thought in terms of how teachers handle their teaching time and pedagogy (Laurillard, 2002).
The focus and interest of this study are on the role of teachers and how they work to develop concrete skills and strategies for teaching effectively. It looks at how they attempt to bridge the distance between teachers and learners and to establish their presence in blended learning environments in both face-to-face and online contexts. Teaching in blended learning environments requires specific pedagogical approaches; and how educators prepare to teach in these environments will potentially impact the quality of the learning experience they provide (Kim et al, 2015).
Given the importance of teaching presence and based on the assumption that teachers are key if learners are to achieve appropriate learning outcomes, this study sets out to examine the role of the teacher and the perceptions of their learners through an analysis of teaching presence (Garrison et al, 2000) in both environments, face-to-face and online, and understand how teachers and learners make sense of that blend. The data was collected at a university in Northwest Mexico over three years between 2016 and 2019 from four undergraduate-level blended learning courses in the field of English Language Teaching, Software Engineering, and International Commerce.
Findings suggest that teaching presence can enhance the learners´ educational experience as it emphasises the organisation of instructional design in their courses. Evidence showed that learners feel a disconnection between the face-to-face and the online components if their teachers lack ownership of their blended course. Thus, there seems to be a need to further integrate both environments so that they become a real blend. In addition, the study reported lower levels of perceived teaching presence in the online component. Teacher immediacy is experienced by learners only in the classroom which does little to encourage their engagement as online learners.

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ORCID for Kate Borthwick: orcid.org/0000-0003-2251-7898

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