Toward New Conceptualizations of Online Learning: Improving the Community of Inquiry Model

• In Event: Diverse Perspectives on Improving Online Learning Theory, Research, and Practice

Abstract

Purpose
The Community of Inquiry (CoI) theory describes the instructional, cognitive, and social conditions necessary for online collaborative learning to succeed (Garrison, 2017). This paper summarizes the model and highlights opportunities for its improvement by identifying gaps and integrating recent insights from fields outside educational technology (i.e., educational psychology and the learning sciences) toward a new conceptualization that addresses these gaps.

Perspectives
Within the CoI model, the teaching presence (TP) concept highlights instructional design, facilitation of productive discourse, and direct instruction as requirements for online collaborative instruction. The model describes how instructors design, facilitate and direct cognitive and social processes to assist learners to develop personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile forms of learning (Anderson et al., 2001). Similarly, the social presence concept (SP) describes cohesive, interactive, and affective conditions that enable learners to project themselves as real people in a community of inquiry, creating relationships that promote collaborative knowledge construction (Rourke et al., 2001). Finally, the cognitive presence concept (CP) defines such knowledge construction as a cyclical process whereby members of a community of inquiry engage in sustained, productive online dialogue, framed by teaching and social presence (Garrison, 2017).

Methods and Data Sources
As a theoretical paper, methods and data were a synthesis of over two decades of relevant research and theoretical literature to identify critiques of CoI, leading to a new conceptualization.

Results
Although concise and highly influential, the CoI model has been critiqued in at least two important ways. One critique of CoI is that far more definitions of social presence exist in the literature than are accounted for in the CoI model, leading to differing measures of the SP construct. Additionally, the social dimensions of collaborative learning, especially as promoted through team learning behaviors in the learning sciences (e.g., Miyake & Kirschner, 2014), could help improve understanding of the social presence construct. Furthermore, through shared scholarship with researchers of computer-supported collaborative learning (e.g., Kreijns et al., 2021) we may fully realize and operationalize the social presence construct by examining how research across educational technology, educational psychology, and the learning sciences aligns and/or is contradictory (Shea et al., in press).

A second critique relates to the conflation of teaching and learning roles in the CoI model, and the need to better conceptualize how strategic online learners succeed in collaborative online settings. For example, the current three “presences” do not include a “learner” presence, but rather assume that the roles of successful online learners are reflected in the other presences. We argue that this is an opportunity to improve the model and we integrate contemporary concepts of self-, co-, and socially shared regulation of learning (Järvelä et.al, 2018) into the current model to address this gap.

Significance
Through this integration of new conceptualizations of CoI we argue that the model is improved in its capacity to account for phenomena previously outside its scope. Specifically the updated model more effectively accounts for individual and joint regulation of cognition, behavior, affect, and motivation in online collaborative learning environments.

Authors

• Peter Shea, University at Albany - SUNY
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer C. Richardson, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Karen P. Swan, University of Illinois at Springfield
  Non-Presenting Author