Article Preview
TopIntroduction
The community of inquiry framework created by Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson is a dynamic online learning model that focuses on how to effectively design and organize online courses by establishing and enhancing three presences, namely, teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence, to cultivate students’ critical thinking and realize deep learning (Vitomir Kovanović et al., 2018). Among the three presences, the main purpose of teaching presence is to maintain a social and cognitive presence through instructional design and facilitating students’ learning (Garrison et al., 2001). Teaching presence includes three subcategories: design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction.
Social presence is the foundation of critical thinking and deep learning (Garrison & Akyol, 2013), which means “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Rourke et al.,1999). Social presence includes three subcategories: affective expression, open communication, and group cohesion.
Cognitive presence is “the extent to which learners can construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse” (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001). This framework has been widely used in various curriculum design and evaluation. Cognitive presence includes four subcategories: triggering events, exploration, integration, and resolution.
Teaching, social, and cognitive presence are closely related to students’ online learning satisfaction (Shea et al., 2003; Joo et al., 2009), online learning persistence (Joo et al., 2011), and perceived learning (Laves, 2010). Students’ perception of teaching, social, and cognitive presence is an important indicator to evaluate the quality of online and blended courses. The researchers focus on students’ perceptions of these three presences of online and blended courses. However, studies have also explored whether different groups of learners’ perceptions of these three presences vary. Specifically, studies have examined whether students from different academic backgrounds in the same course have differences in perception of these three presences. The answers to these questions are helpful for practitioners to design targeted learning activities and effective learning activities to achieve differentiated teaching.
The development of MOOC(Massive Open Online Course) provides unprecedented opportunities for universities to carry out high-quality blended learning. This form of learning can effectively facilitate traditional face-to-face teaching and can provide students rich learning activities and experiences. At present, an increasing number of practitioners and researchers are implementing MOOC-based blended learning. In China, many universities have begun to run MOOC-based blended courses to teach public compulsory courses where students come from different academic backgrounds. By doing so, schools can take advantage of MOOC to solve problems such as insufficient course resources, inflexible teaching methods, and shortage of excellent teachers caused by a large number of students and heavy teaching tasks. However, some studies (e.g., Akyol & Garrison, 2008; Akyol et al., 2011; Poquet et al., 2018) indicated that course duration and cohort size have important effects on the development of social presence. For example, Poquet et al. (2018) noted the challenges of establishing affective expression in MOOCs, particularly in short courses with large student cohorts. In addition, the level of teaching, social, and cognitive presence is relatively low in MOOC-based blended courses, especially those with a large number of students (Bai, Ma, & Wu., 2016). To further optimize the design and implementation of such large-scale MOOC or MOOC-based blended courses, practitioners should improve students’ perception of teaching, social, and cognitive presence. Thus, this study attempts to take different academic backgrounds, different genders, and different online learning experiences as the basis of group classification. Then, we use this classification to explore whether different student groups have different perceptions of teaching, social, and cognition presence in the same xMOOC-based blended course. Moreover, we determine what kind of differences exist. The researchers hope that this study can provide enlightenment for the development of theory and the implementation of MOOC and MOOC-based blended courses.