Measuring the teaching presence of online faculty in a blended program for entrepreneurs

Abstract

Blended programs have gained immense popularity due to the synergy derived out of online and face-to-face pedagogies. However, in blended programs, at times students tend to compare the utility and value of the online component vis-à-vis face-to-face component. This comparison may escalate to the teaching presence of faculty especially if the professors facilitating the online and face-to-face components happen to be two different individuals. This study reports such an issue faced in a blended program for entrepreneurs and family businesses, where the students complained about less than expected teaching presence of the faculty on the online asynchronous discussion boards (DBs). The taxonomy proposed by Blignaut & Trollip (2003) was utilised by including two more dimensions namely, the DB topics and length of the faculty postings to measure the teaching presence in four completed courses of the program. The findings uncovered various dimensions of the teaching presence including an over emphasis of the faculty on informative postings while neglecting the corrective postings, lack of comprehensiveness and a declining trend in the number of faculty postings, thus impacting the student engagement on the online DBs. The utility of this simple yet effective method of measuring the teaching presence can be extended beyond the completed classes to the ongoing classes for aiding the faculty in conducting mid-course corrections to improve student engagement. © 2008 Kanishka Bedi.