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ABOUT THE FRAMEWORK
SOCIAL, COGNITIVE, AND TEACHING PRESENCE

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements: social, cognitive and teaching presence.

SOCIAL PRESENCE

From Rourke et al., 2001:

Social presence is the ability of learners to project their personal characteristics into the community of inquiry, thereby presenting themselves as ‘real people.’

Instructional media such as computer conferencing engender high levels of student-student and student-teacher interaction; therefore, they can support models of teaching and learning that are highly interactive and consonant with the communicative ideals of university education. This potential, and the ubiquity of computer conferencing in higher education prompted three of the authors of the present paper to develop a Community of Inquiry model that synthesizes pedagogical principles with the inherent instructional and access benefits of computer conferencing (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). The present article explicates one element of the model, social presence. Social presence is defined as the ability of learners to project themselves socially and affectively into a community of inquiry. A template for assessing social presence in computer conferencing is presented, through content analysis of conferencing transcripts. To facilitate explication of the scheme and subsequent replication of this study, selections of coded transcripts are included, along with inter-rater reliability figures. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications and benefits of assessing social presence for instructors, conference moderators, and researchers.

COGNITIVE PRESENCE

From Garrison et al., 2001:

Cognitive presence is the extent to which the participants in any particular configuration of a community of inquiry are able to construct meaning through sustained communication.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a practical approach to judging the nature and quality of critical discourse in a computer conference. A model of a critical community of inquiry frames the research. A core concept in defining a community of inquiry is cognitive presence. In turn, the practical inquiry model operationalizes cognitive presence for the purpose of developing a tool to assess critical discourse and reflection. Encouraging empirical findings related to an attempt to create an efficient and reliable instrument to assess the nature and quality of critical discourse and thinking in a text-based educational context are presented. Finally, it is suggested that cognitive presence (i.e., critical, practical inquiry) can be created and supported in a computer conference environment with appropriate teaching and social presence.

TEACHING PRESENCE

From Garrison et al., 2001:

Teaching presence is defined as the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educational worthwhile learning outcomes.

This paper reviews the tasks of the online teacher, gleaned from the literature and our own experiences as teachers of graduate level, online courses. It next introduces a technique for systematically analyzing the context of the text-based transcripts of those courses. We seek knowledge hidden in the data from the actual interactions between and among students and on-line teachers as they develop, facilitate, guide and evaluate learning activities. Our goal is to develop tools that are efficient, reliable, and practical in the task of helping teachers both understand and improve their on-line teaching. We examine messages for their contribution to three critical functions of the online (and classroom) teacher – designing and administrating learning activities, establishing and and maintaining an active learning community, and providing direct instruction. We hope our tools allow teachers to assess their own postings and serve as valued feedback for reflection and improvement of the teaching function. Secondly, the tools can be used for research to test hypothesis or diagnose problems in on-line teaching. We conclude with the results of our analysis of the transcripts from two graduate level teaching courses.

Key references available as a downloadable file below have been compiled by Dr. Randy Garrison as an effective reading list for the Community of Inquiry framework. (Updated September 2021)

CoI FRAMEWORK READING LIST
RECENT COMMENTS

Corna Olivier on Integration of AI, specifically GenAI in the Community of Inquiry
1 month ago
Good morning from sunny South Africa, I’m currently working on my PhD, where I’m exploring the integration of GenAI chatbots within the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. My goal is to develop a set of guidelines for training chatbots to effectively function as active agents in supporting meaningful ...

D. Randy Garrison on The CoI Community
1 month ago
I see no reason why this would not work. I would encourage you to explore this further. Best, DRG

Joe Gollner on The CoI Community
1 month ago
Hello CoI Community. I am Joe Gollner from beautiful Victoria BC. I am a semi-retired businessman / technology entrepreneur who has somehow come to make postgraduate research in Management, and more specifically Management Education, my twisted version of retirement. In these inquiries, I came upon, and have been ...

Lailaturrahmi on The CoI Community
4 months ago
Hi Marije, I am not sure if this addresses your question, but this tool may help: Teacher Self-Assessment and Exploration Tool: https://read.aupress.ca/read/principles-of-blended-learning/section/2b32aff1-63b8-4b09-9c79-84bc13b61a56 ...

Damilare on The CoI Community
4 months ago
Hello community, I'm Dami, a student of Political Science and International Relations. From Osun State University, Nigeria. I saw this community, because I was in search of a community that would help improve my knowledge, and might get to meet students like me who wants to get better in their various courses and be ...

D. Randy Garrison on The CoI Community
5 months ago
Marije, Not sure I can be of much direct help. There is considerable research on faculty development if that would help. There is extensive research where faculty have used the CoI framework to design online learning experiences. Finally, I am not clear as to your question regarding different courses. the framework ...

Marije Lesterhuis on The CoI Community
5 months ago
Hey all, I am an assistant professor at the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Netherlands. I am interested in the framework, as my PhD student in Kenya is using it in his PhD research. He is looking into online and blended learning. We've found already some work within medical education, but have not found much ...

D. Randy Garrison on Can I use the three elements of the CoI as the theoretical framework to support the research on professional learning community and 21st-century teaching among teachers?
9 months ago
Most definitely. In fact, we used the CoI framework for professional development when Dr. Norm Vaughan did his doctorate on the subject. The following will provide an introduction to this work. Vaughan, N., & Garrison, D. R. (2005). Creating cognitive presence in a blended faculty development community. Internet and ...

S. LING PHEY on Can I use the three elements of the CoI as the theoretical framework to support the research on professional learning community and 21st-century teaching among teachers?
9 months ago
Can the three elements of the CoI framework be integrated and applied to support the professional learning community and 21st-century teaching among teachers? From my reading, CoI is more geared toward students' learning, although the teaching presence element focuses on the ...

D. Randy Garrison on Cognitive Presence Update
1 year ago
The easy answer is that they cannot be easily separated; they overlap in the Venn diagram. According to the diagram and theory, each can have differing influence on the educational experience (dependent variable however it is defined). Off the top I suppose that the correlation among the presences will depend on the ...
The Community of Inquiry is a project of Athabasca University, Mount Royal University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, as well as researchers and members of the CoI community.