This paper addresses the rapidly advancing spread of e-learning/online instruction formats in higher education. Globally, institutional and market pressures in higher education generate strong inducements to adopt such approaches, and university faculty in many fields see diverse reasons, programmatic and pedagogical, to explore the possibilities.

The context of decisions about pursuing these kinds of instructional innovations for those teaching in higher education is fraught with concern. Particularly in domains of study that, both by tradition and in principle, are not tied to explicit vocational, technical, and/or instrumental outcomes—broadly speaking, the traditional liberal arts and humanities, subjects constituting what Oakeshott (2001) spoke of as the “great conversation”--the need to maintain a foothold in the evolving academy is real, if not, as Donoghue (2008) suggests, a lost cause. What might the rise of E-learning mean for fields such as these?

The paper focuses on a fundamental distinction between e-learning/online instruction formats and traditional classroom teaching based on the alteration of what it means for teachers and students to be present to one another. This raises numerous questions as to the nature, varieties and role of presence in teaching.

The inquiry thus involves the phenomenology of presence, particularly with respect to the way authority operates in complex domains of understanding and sense-making. As Bernard Williams suggests (2004), efforts to make sense of complex matters invariably involve individual needs and perspectives; given that that is so, the question becomes how anyone gains the capacity and disposition to move beyond their initial needs and inclinations and engage more deeply in the subject at hand, or question their standpoint commitments. It is evident that the embodied presence of a teacher sometimes, though never automatically, can have this impact. One is at such moment, as Kerdeman (2003) put it, called up short, the very ground of understanding shifts beneath one’s feet. Do virtual learning communities duplicate or extend such possibilities?

The paper examines the distinctive underpinnings, presuppositions, conditions and possibilities of virtual and embodied presence in teaching. It suggests that the forms of presence do indeed, despite efforts to maintain common goals, generate distinctive possibilities of teacher-student interaction and gravitate toward distinctive ideals. In emerging works on contemporary media (e.g., deZengatita, 2005) and, particularly online instruction (e.g., Palloff and Pratt, 2007; Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 2000) we see evidence of what we refer to as an emphasis on utility of presence. In contrast, face-to-face instruction provides the conditions for the emergence of what we call integrity of presence. Drawing upon thinkers who have helped elucidate the sense and significance of presence in face-to-face teaching, including Murdoch (1970), Kierkegaard (1965), Gadamer (1993), Egan (1997), and Woodruff (2002), the paper advances a conception of integrity of presence centered on philosophical inquiry regarding the interplay of reverence and irony in disciplined pursuits of understanding.

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