Researchers emphasize that learning presence is an important component Community of Inquiry (CoI) for understanding the process of knowledge construction through participants' meaningful engagement in an online environment. Assigning roles in learning environments helps to distribute responsibility among group members and gives learners the opportunity to develop a variety of skills as they assume these different roles. There are studies in the literature examining the relationship between social and cognitive presence and role assignment. However, researches examining the relationship between learning presence and role assignment are limited. The study aimed to examine the relationship between role assignment and the learning presence component of CoI. In addition, the research examined how the level of self-directed learning (SDL) was affected in this context. This study was carried out using a mixed method. 72 pre-service teachers participated in the study. Self-directed learning scale was used as a data collection tool. The sessions were also analyzed. The coding template suggested by Shea et al. (2014) for the learning presence was used. Quantitative analysis showed the mean value for the post-test (= 39.51) was higher than that for pre-test (= 37.57). There was a statistically significant difference between the means obtained from the pre-test and post-test (p < 0.05). This shows that assigning the students roles had an effect on the students' SDL skills. Qualitative analysis revealed different roles are associated with different categories and indicators of the learning presence. The information provider was the role most associated with learning presence indicators, followed by problem solver. The information provider had the most input with around 38% of posts. The question generator followed with 17.5%, while the problem solver had 14.2% and the opinion provider had 13.8%. Posts in monitoring category of the learning presence were quite common, accounting for approximately 90% (n=5177) of total posts. Posts in the Strategy Use (S) category came in second, accounting for approximately 7.7% of the total posts (n=445). Posts in the Reflection (R) category were the fewest, accounting for approximately 0.56% (n=35) of the total posts.