Under the COVID-19 pandemic virtual learning environment, instructors have had to address various challenges such as integrating technologies with the curriculum, encouraging social interactions among students, and keeping students cognitively engaged and motivated. These challenges may be usefully organized into teaching, social, and cognitive presences within the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) framework as well as the learner characteristic of self-efficacy, which is necessary to keep students motivated. Specifically, the current study sought to investigate how these challenges are interrelated in the domain of writing and impact academic outcomes among 142 Rice University students enrolled in a First Year Writing Seminar. Because there was no variance in slopes among students and academic performance was range restricted, the main findings associated with the slope could not reject the null hypothesis. However, exploratory analyses reveal that cognitive presence and writing self-efficacy intercepts were more impactful on beliefs and affect about writing.