Best Practices for Enhancing Teaching Presence in Online Courses

Online education has become increasingly popular in graduate nursing education. Establishing a strong sense of teaching presence in online courses requires planning and effort on the part of the instructor. The purpose of this project was to develop an evidence-based online asynchronous educational module to enhance nurse educators’ teaching presence behaviors in online courses. Teaching presence survey tools were developed and pilot tested to evaluate instructors’ self-reported teaching presence behaviors over time, as well as their intent and actual follow-through in performing teaching presence behaviors. Despite statistically significant higher levels of participants’ intent to perform teaching presence behaviors following the educational module, there was no significant change in the frequency of teaching presence behaviors reported by participants 8 weeks after completion of the module. Overall, the self-reported scores for each of the teaching presence behaviors on the surveys was high, offering little perceived room for improvement in this group of experienced instructors.