Troy Priest, Senior Instructional Designer

Over the past few months as courses have moved from face-to-face to remote online, both faculty and students have had to –  for better or for worse –  adapt to the new format. Whether moving to remote, synchronous classes or to fully online, asynchronous courses, the transition has many faculty rethinking their course design. Many are reevaluating how they teach their courses and what they need to do to engage students when they may no longer meet at a scheduled time or in a physical space. 

Shifting your course from face-to-face to online requires more than just using technologies to move your content online. It requires reflection and careful consideration on how you might adapt and redesign elements of your course to engage students as a community of learners. 

One useful model for informing our course (re)design is the Community of Inquiry Framework (CoI) (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000; Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007). A Community of Inquiry is a group of learners who through collaboration and discussion construct meaning and understanding. The CoI framework lays out a collaborative-constructivist approach to the learning experience which consists of three essential and interdependent elements – teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence (Community of Inquiry Framework, n.d.). 

Teaching Presence

Within the CoI framework, teaching presence can be established by thoughtful and evidence-based instructional design principles. Careful course design, active facilitation, and direct instruction work together to promote social and cognitive processes to achieve meaningful learning. This requires us to rethink our assumptions about how our courses should be designed and delivered in the online space to engage students. We have to ask ourselves, will what I do in the face-to-face course work well in my online course? 

Some factors to consider in the design and implementation of the online course are:

• Facilitating student learning through discussion boards/VoiceThreads – giving consideration to the ways you want students to participate and how you will moderate those discussions
• Providing students with frequent, timely, and formative feedback
• Determining the layout of the course in Blackboard or Learning Management System (LMS) – thinking about how will students engage in the content, where they will find pertinent information, and being explicit about what students need to do to succeed

Social Presence

Garrison (2009, p. 352) describes social presence as “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop interpersonal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.“ With careful consideration and intentional instructional design, we can create and facilitate social presence in an online learning environment. 

Some ways we can create social presence are by: 

• Projecting our teaching persona via regular Blackboard announcements, welcome video and/or course or module overview videos (using  Zoom, VoiceThread, or Echo 360) thus modeling behavior for our students
• Developing course activities that allow the class to establish trust and rapport facilitated through the use of icebreakers, discussion boards, and group and collaborative assignments and projects
• Offering virtual office hours via Zoom

Cognitive Presence

Cognitive presence relates to the extent that learners are able to construct meaning through discourse and reflection. By conveying the big ideas we want students to know and carefully designing activities and assessments around those activities.  

Ways to develop cognitive presence are by:

• Providing frequent formative assessment and meaningful feedback
• Articulating clear and measurable learning objectives for the course and modules
• Using a variety of teaching methods, media, and modalities with multiple opportunities for practice and reflection to achieve the learning outcomes
• Encourage critical and creative thinking where students question their own assumptions, consider diverse perspectives, and respond to open-ended questions through online discussions and reflections

The CoI can be a useful framework when thinking about (re)designing your online course. If you would like more information about the CoI or you would like to consult with one of our instructional designers to talk about your courses, please contact us at CELT@stonybrook.edu

References: 

Community of Inquiry Framework (n.d.) Purdue University Innovative Learning. Retrieved November 3, 2020, from https://www.purdue.edu/innovativelearning/supporting-instruction/portal/files/4_Community_of_Inquiry_Framework.pdf

Garrison, D. R. (2009). Communities of inquiry in online learning. In Encyclopedia of Distance Learning, Second Edition (pp. 352-355). IGI Global.

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The internet and higher education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Garrison, D. R., & Arbaugh, J. B. (2007). Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. The Internet and higher education, 10(3), 157-172.