Recently a graduate student interviewed me about the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework and the issue of motivation. This caused me to reflect on work that I had done on the topic of motivation earlier in my career that had indirectly contributed to foundational ideas associated with the CoI framework (Garrison & Archer, 2000). Motivation has been associated with teaching and social presence in terms of learner satisfaction; moreover, teaching and social presence are crucial for motivation and engagement (Turk, Heddy & Danielson, 2022). Nasir and Ngah (2022) also found “that teaching, social, and cognitive presence in the CoI have a significant influence on students’ satisfaction” (Abstract) and argued that “increased satisfaction would decrease dropout rates and withdrawal from online courses” (Discussion). They concluded that future research should explore the relationship of the CoI framework to other variables, such as motivation.

In another study of motivation and the CoI framework, Lee and Lim (2022) investigated “how the features of motivation develop in online courses during the semester and how students’ perceived teaching and social presences influence their motivational growth in online learning” (Abstract). ...

As a part of this doctoral thesis students’ teaching presence were studied. The purpose of the thesis has been to explore how students support their own and other students' process of inquiry while engaging in online tutoring sessions, as well as to study how their support can be connected to students’ expressions of teaching presence.

In order to study students’ interactions, chat messages were collected from an online text-based chat system. The method of transcript analysis from the Relationship of Inquiry (RoI) framework, the coding scheme developed in the frame of this thesis, was used to analyze the data. The RoI framework is adapted from the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, adjusted for the case of only one student and one teacher, such as tutoring sessions where the student and the tutor are encouraged to create a relationship of inquiry. The RoI framework adopted the three presences from the CoI framework, but also added the fourth element emotional presence. Using the developed RoI coding scheme students’ messages was analyzed, with focus on students’ expressions of teaching presence. Through analysis of these expressions, students’ support of their own and other students’ process of inquiry, as well as connections towards metacognitive development, may be found.
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