The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has forced the continuous adaptations of teaching and learning in the new normality, with a shift to e-learning distance education where teachers performed multiple functions (Garrison, 2009). Teaching presence contributed significantly to online courses (Wang et al., 2021) and teachers placed more emphasis on teacher-student and student-content interactions rather than student-student interactions (Le et al., 2022). However, little research has been conducted on the practices of teaching presence in e-learning and distance education, an important but under-researched area, in the context of Vietnamese higher education. Adapting Garrison (2009) as a theoretical framework, this paper presents a study into how teachers adjusted their teaching for e-learning and distance education in the new normality.
Employing a qualitative research design (Creswell & Creswell, 2017), data were collected from a semi-structured interview with teachers at a Vietnamese university. Interview transcripts were coded and analysed deductively and inductively using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Results reveal that teachers deployed a variety of teaching practices around three main categories (Garrison et al. 2000) and enacted as an agent of change associated with diverse challenges for their teaching preparation. Pedagogical implications are discussed.