Turning the Community of Inquiry Framework into Action

Breaking down the Community of Inquiry Framework into tangible and indicators helps us turn ideas into actions.

_{(from Cleveland-Innes (2018) Guide to Blended Learning  http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/3095)}

The rest of the units in this course book will go into more detail about most of these elements but to give you some idea now of what it looks like, here are some examples of elements and tasks that support the development of each of the Community of Inquiry presences.

Developing Social Presence:

• Create course rules or ‘netiquette’ at the beginning of the course and have students contribute to them. This helps students to set expectations of themselves and others and develops buy-in.
• Structure learning activities that require students to work together to accomplish goals. For example, sharing key information from a core text on a single slide.
• Project your personality through your communications. Being a ‘real person’ online encourages others to do the same.
• Share emotions. Use emoticons in written communication. Don’t be frightened to express emotion in audio and video communications.

Developing Cognitive Presence:

• Explore topics using prompts that stimulate curiosity and puzzlement. Seek different viewpoints on a particular problem or content area to stimulate divergent thinking.
• Create learning activities that require students to summarise, refine or otherwise conclude.
• Have students apply their conclusions to new problems or contexts.
• Encourage students to reflect on their earlier analysis of the problem or prompt and discuss how has their thinking moved on.

Developing Teaching Presence:

• Make everything more explicit than you think you need to. There are many ways in which instructions and communications can be misinterpreted online so over-explaining is better than leaving room for doubt.

• Check that your course is well organised, that students can navigate the materials easily and that links and activities are available with one click.
• Be active in asynchronous discussions.

• Express your personality. Demonstrate your interest, enthusiasm, and emotional connection to the topic.

How the Community of Inquiry Framework informs the remaining units in this book

Ultimately

The ultimate goal is student engagement in your online, blended, and/or hyflex course. When students are described as being engaged in a course, the following can be observed:

• Students invest time and energy in their learning.
• The learning design is student-centred.
• The learning environment is supportive, inclusive, and accessible.
• There exists a degree of flexibility in the teaching of the course.
• There are collaborative opportunities for students.
• There are assessment and feedback loops that help individual students progress.
• There is space and time for students to experiment, and to be curious active learners.