Differences in how students and teachers understand online teaching presence play a key role in teaching design. To explore how students and teachers perceive teaching presence, this study surveyed 1,041 students and 18 teachers who participated in an online course at a Chinese university. The analysis found students' perceived teaching presence was significantly lower than the teachers', particularly in terms of facilitating discourse (p < 0.001). Regarding the perceived importance of the five dimensions of teaching presence (Wang et al., 2019), students perceived facilitating discourse to be more important than direct instruction, while the opposite was found to be true for teachers. The divergence creates a challenge for teachers in engaging students in learning. The results indicate that teachers could pay more attention to the following dimensions to improve students' learning experience: making macro-level comments on courses, designing instructional methods, providing formative feedback for homework and discussions, and making full use of technological tools in teaching.