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Abstract

Online courses are increasingly common and taken more frequently by students, yet students' perceptions of them may portray instructors as invisible and uninvolved. Drawing on social information processing theory, we argue that cues intended to signal course design are also interpreted relationally. Teaching presence, the work instructors do to be “present” in the online environment, is not merely instructional structure: it is relational communication embedded in course design. This study explored whether teaching presence and students' perceptions of immediacy and credibility are related, and whether those relationships differ by student gender. Using a cross-sectional survey, we divided our sample into male (n = 97) and female (n = 193) subgroups and conducted correlational analyses to examine potential gender differences. Findings suggest teaching presence cues are perceived more strongly by women than by men, highlighting the need to consider how online courses are experienced differently across student groups. Post hoc moderated regression analysis revealed only modest gender patterns, indicating that the interactions between the teaching presence variables and the perceptions reflect tendencies rather than categorical differences.

Journal Title

Iowa Journal of Communication

Volume

58

Issue

1

First Page

60

Last Page

83

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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