What About the Nth Presence for the Community of Inquiry Framework?

• In Event: The Community of Inquiry Framework: 20 Years and Going Strong

Abstract

The purpose here is to discuss a comprehensive review (i.e., Author, 2018) of the recent research suggesting revisions for the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison & Akyol, 2013a, 2013b). A community of inquiry is “a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding” (Garrison & Akyol, 2013a, p. 105). Such a learning inquiry occurs in the intersection of (a) cognitive presence, “the extent to which the participants in any particular configuration of a community of inquiry are able to construct meaning through sustained communication” and “is most basic to success in higher education” (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000, p. 89); (b) teaching presence, “the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes” (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001, p. 5); and (c) social presence, “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” (Garrison, 2009, p. 352).
Adding to the theoretical and empirical points above, there has been recent research offering new presences or presence dimensions thus enlarging the CoI framework. We expect such revisions to align with the existing conceptual and theoretical background meaningfully without producing any inconclusive insights. After all, weaker theoretical and practical contributions would lead to theoretical and practical inconsistencies, and weaken further research and practice that would test them. Therefore, a thorough revision of the CoI framework is essential for it to address successful online learning as fully as possible. To this end, the present discussion focuses on a systematic review of all (i.e., 23 studies) the previously suggested contributions to the CoI framework so that we can better understand their theoretical and empirical arguments, which is the scientific significance of it. Specifically, what are the recently suggested presence types or dimensions? What are the theoretical and empirical arguments behind them? Where to go from here?
Results of our review revealed (a) new presence types; and (b) new presence dimensions expanding teaching, cognitive and social presences. Specifically, there are four new presence types suggested (autonomy, learning, emotional, and instructor social presence) and dimensions (distributed teaching presence, instructor presence, instructors social presence, and teacher engagement). Surprisingly, instructor social presence has been suggested both as a new presence type and an expansion. Results further suggested that (a) a new recommendation can have similar and/or different aspects across different studies (e.g., instructor presence); (b) it can also have aspects attributed to the original presences (e.g., distributed teaching presence); and (c) different suggestions can have similar characteristics (e.g., learning and autonomy presence). Finally, the research reviewed here has been quite conceptually and theoretically useful despite some methodological (e.g., practical significance, validity of coding procedures, data triangulation, and unit of analysis) and theoretical gaps (e.g., social-constructivism, parsimony, and differences from the existing elements), which waits for further research.

Authors

• Secil Caskurlu, Florida State University

• Kadir Kozan, Purdue University