Engineering education is inherently collaborative and inquiry oriented. This longstanding disciplinary characteristic has been further extended and accelerated into online and blended learning environments. Consequently, collaborative inquiry-based pedagogic approaches have become essential in contemporary engineering education across online and blended settings. Within this context, researchers grounded in the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework have examined participants’ interactions through qualitative observations as well as learners’ reported learning experiences through survey studies. These efforts aim to identify conditions that support the framework’s central objective, namely, achieving an optimal balance among the three CoI presences: Teaching presence (TP), Social presence (SP), and Cognitive presence (CP). However, the dynamic and evolving traits of CoI learning process remains underexplored. Particularly, the effect of teacher’s participation on reconfiguring the CoI presences’ occurrence, development over time, and sequencing remains insufficiently explored. In response, this work-in-process (WIP) exploratory study examines how teacher’s participation reconfigures participants’ CoI presences within engineering education in online and blended settings. This three-phase study proceeds to explore both with-teacher and without-teacher occasions. First, the study measures the frequency of CoI presences occurrence across both settings. Second, the study explores how CoI presences evolve over time by conducting temporal analysis. Third, the study examines how CoI presences develop in sequences in parallel with presenting transiting probability estimations. Thus far, preliminary findings from the dataset show that teacher’s participation is associated with more TP and CP, and less SP, implying more direct instruction and less open communication. It also supports more consistent idea sharing over time, whereas participants’ open communication and participant interactions persist more when teacher doesn’t participate.