It is with some ambivalence that I draw your attention to an article that highlights arguable opportunities for improvement of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Shea, Richardson, & Swan, 2022). The focus of this article is on social presence and “learning presence” as related to regulation of learning. While there are interesting observations regarding social presence, my focus and concern in this post is with the topic of “learning presence” and specifically with regulation in a collaborative community of learners. However, before I can address the important issue of regulation, I must first reiterate my issue with the inclusion of “learning presence” as a fourth presence in the CoI framework.

The original proposal to create a “learning presence” element was made as an argument to consider self-regulated learning in the CoI framework (Shea & Bidjerano, 2011). My fundamental concern continues to be that this construct does not fit within the CoI framework. The issue is that this construct is a violation of the basic premise of a community of inquiry. That is, adding “learning presence” as a fourth element challenges the integrity of the framework by violating the collaborative-constructivist premise and parsimony of the framework. At the time we stated our position as follows:

A major conceptual difficulty that is missed is that all participants in a community of inquiry reflect varying degrees of each of the three presences. ...

The Private University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology UMIT TIROL (www.umit-tirol.at) offers high-quality academic education and advanced training in the fields that have turned out to be of increasing importance in modern health care and technology. For example, in the field of medical informatics, we offer a part-time continuing education program that provides in-depth knowledge in the area of digitization and information management in healthcare. The program is completely online and its course design is based on the Community of Inquiry Framework. This year, we have started a comprehensive project based on the CoI Framework: LACOI: Representation of a Community of Inquiry in Cooperative Online-based Courses through Learning Analytics.