Understanding the Relationship Among Self-Efficacy, Utility Value, and the Community of Inquiry Framework in Preservice Teacher Education

School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have shown the importance of distance education, and teachers have been tasked with designing and delivering online courses in a short amount of time without much preparation or deliberation. As the future generation of teachers, preservice teachers need to be prepared to teach online, and their motivation to do so is a key factor in how successfully they do it. The community of inquiry framework provides researchers and practitioners with a framework for designing and delivering online courses, while self-efficacy and utility value are important motivational constructs predicting future engagement and success in tasks. In this cross-sectional survey study, we investigated preservice teachers’ (n = 344) perceptions of their self-efficacy, utility value, the importance of the three components of the community of inquiry framework: teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. Our results show that overall, preservice teachers had high motivation to teach online and high perceptions of the three presences. Our regression analyses indicated that while preservice teachers’ self-efficacy was a significant predictor of teaching presence, utility value only significantly predicted social presence. We discuss the implications of these findings for teacher education programs, including a holistic approach to teaching online learning and instructional design