Abstract The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationships between and among teaching, social, and cognitive presence. To this end, Spearman's rank correlation and partial correlation analyses were employed. The results referred to (a) positive large bivariate correlational relationships between presence types, and (b) the dependence of these pairwise relationships on the third presence to a certain extent. For instance, it was found that cognitive presence may have a strong effect on the relationship between teaching presence and social presence because the relationship between teaching presence and social presence may disappear when cognitive presence is controlled for. On the other hand, results also suggested that the relationship between cognitive presence and social presence, and the relationship between teaching presence and cognitive presence may largely be independent of the effect of the other third presence.