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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.

RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS AND AUTHORS

The images below are openly licensed through an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license and can be used with proper attribution to the Community of Inquiry website. Individual written permission is not required. A typical attribution statement (included within the figure's caption) is:

The Community of Inquiry framework. Image used with permission from the Community of Inquiry website and licensed under the CC-BY-SA International 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). The original image is located at https://www.thecommunityofinquiry.org/framework
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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

Jane Howley on The CoI Community
3 months ago
My name is Jane Howley and I have been working in education since 1994 when I started teaching EFL in Salvador Brazil. Currently I am doing a Masters Degree with the Open University in Online Teaching and working on a collaborative piece of research to make field trips more ...

Marcy McCarty on The CoI Community
4 months ago
Hello Dan! Many thanks for addressing my question! When I am done, I would be happy to share! Thank you! Marcy

Dan Wilton on The CoI Community
4 months ago
Welcome to the CoI community, Marcy! Wherever possible, we've put resources under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, which allows you use, for example, the CoI framework diagram or the CoI Survey in your work as long as its attributed back to this website and any modifications noted. You'll find downloadable ...

Marcy McCarty on The CoI Community
4 months ago
Greetings! My name is Marcy McCarty. I am the associate dean for the school of graduate and professional studies at a small private college where all programs are online. I am completing my doctorate degree in performance improvement leadership, focusing my research on the quality of faculty engagement in the online ...

Lora B. Pezzell on The CoI Community
5 months ago
Hello, my name is Lora Pezzell, M.A., M.S., I am an instructional designer at the University of Central Oklahoma. We use the COI framework when we are training our faculty about how to teach courses online. I find it is a very helpful ...

DEVINE MURERI on The CoI Community
6 months ago
Hie Fellow. I am Devine Mureri From Zimbabwe . I am Studying BCOM HONS (FINANCIAL DEGREE) at Great Zimbabwe University so , i am interested in taking some of the Survey's at my school under your influence. ...

Kathleen Norris PhD on The CoI Community
6 months ago
Hello, My name is Kathleen Norris. I retired as an elementary school principal three years ago after 40 years of experience as a teacher, administrator, and professional development manager. I am currently a contributing faculty member at Walden University. I recently worked with a team to build an online community of ...

Gemma Mitchelson on The CoI Community
6 months ago
Thank you so much Dan. I will certainly do so :)

Dan Wilton on The CoI Community
7 months ago
Welcome to the CoI community, Gemma! While others will be able to give more detailed guidance than I on the Shared Metacognition Questionnaire, Vaughan and Wah (2022 - linked below) describes one implementation. It's a 5-point Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree), shown in Appendix A. But Shared ...

Gemma Mitchelson on The CoI Community
7 months ago
Hello everyone My name is Gemma and I am studying a Doctorate in Education. I am really keen to use the Shared Metacognition Questionnaire as one tool for gathering data but I cannot find any information on how to implement it? Is a 6-point likert scale used and if so, what are the measurements used e.g. strongly ...
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.