Abstract
The community of inquiry (CoI) framework was developed by researchers at the University of Alberta who were interested in exploring the learning that took place among participants in online discussions. Garrison, Anderson, and Archer grounded their thinking in Dewey's progressive epistemology which placed inquiry within a community of learners at the center of the educational experience. The CoI model they created conceptualizes learning in online environments as supported by three interacting presences – social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. This chapter will describe the CoI framework, briefly review research supporting its efficacy in online course design and implementation, and explore how the framework can be applied to blended and online learning environments in general and the i2Flex model in particular.
TopThe Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison et al., 2000; 2001) is a social collaborative model of the interactive processes that support learning in online and blended environments. It is a process model which assumes that effective online learning requires the development of a community (Hilliarda & Stewart, 2019; Rovai, 2002; Shea, 2006) that supports meaningful inquiry and deep learning. The CoI framework has been widely applied to inform both the research and practice of online learning worldwide, and an increasing body of research supports its efficacy (Arbaugh et al., 2008; Dempsey & Jang, 2019; Lawa et al., 2019; Swan et al., 2009).
Building from the notion of social presence in online discussion (Gunawardena, 1995), the CoI framework represents the online learning experience as a function of the relationship between three presences: social, cognitive, and teaching. The concept of “presence” here is in some sense functional and purposively applied to indicate that the presences should not be conceived as attached to actors but rather can emanate from any of the participants or even the materials in an online or blended course (Swan et al., 2009). The CoI framework suggests that online learning is located at the intersection of these three presences, and that all three presences are necessary for learning to take place (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The community of inquiry framework
In the three sections which follow, the role of each of the presences in the CoI framework is described, relevant research findings concerning it summarized, and the practical implications of the latter explored.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Blended Learning: Courses which integrate online and traditional face-to-face activities in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner, and in which a portion of face-to-face time is replaced with online activities.
Cognitive Presence: The design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes.
Teaching Presence: The extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry.
Social Presence: The ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally as ‘real’ people; the degree to which participants in mediated communication feel socially and emotionally connected.
CoI Survey: A self-report survey that measures online and blended learners’ perceptions of learning processes in their courses in terms of teaching presence (13 items), social presence (9 items) and cognitive presence (12 items) and the sub-elements of which they are comprised.
Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework: A social-constructivist model of the processes that support the development of community and learning in online and blended environments which represents the educational experience in such environments as developing from the intersection of three presences – social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.
Blending With Purpose: Picciano’s (2009) idea that blended courses should be carefully planned with course objectives and activities thoughtfully matched to the media which best support them.
Quality Matters Rubric: A faculty-oriented, peer review instrument based on instructional design principles and created to assure quality in the design of online and blended courses, consisting of standards in eight categories.
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy: A classification system originally developed by Benjamin Bloom to distinguish different levels of human cognition elicited by classroom activities; revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) to reflect current classroom practices including the use of educational technologies, consisting of six levels – remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.