Rubric to Evaluate Online Course Syllabi Plans for Engendering a Community of Inquiry

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 77
  In Roundtable Session: Quality Assurance in Online Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Online educators need effective communication practices for delivering content and building discourse to create an online community of inquiry (COI). This includes social and cognitive interactions among students, instructors, and experts in the field, as well as varied interactions with the content. What are the effective practices and procedures that can engender a COI, and how can we plan for them? To address this, we created a rubric to evaluate planned interactions in course syllabi that could engender a COI. We obtained substantial interrater-reliability agreement with our rubric. We used it to evaluate 23 College of Education online course syllabi and found that cognitive presence was high, while social presence and teacher presence were not.

Authors

• Sandra A. Rogers, Spring Hill College

• James P. Van Haneghan, University of South Alabama