What is a Community of Inquiry? “An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.” Garrison, D and Anderson, T (2003).
Collaborative activities are extremely important in all kinds of education including online learning. And collaborative learning can produce a sense of immersion where contributions of the educators and students, and the quality of the activities undertaken by the group determine how immersed the participants feel.
The ability to engage in effective discourse, to collaborate with fellow learners as well as teachers, to reflect and construct personal meaning, and confirm mutual understanding as described in the above definition, are learning activities and outcomes that are expected by all learners when choosing the education establishment (or community of enquiry) that will fulfill their learning aspirations.
Garrison, D and Anderson, T (2003) provide a community of enquiry model, which can be used as a guide when setting up communities of enquiry. In this model three kinds of presence are defined as requirements for a community of enquiry, Cognitive Presence, Social Presence, and Teacher Presence.
The description of all three presences, contribute in some way to the establishment of a sense of immersion that a student requires in order to engage in effective discourse and learning.
Cognitive Presence: Immersion cannot happen if learners are not mentally present and able to participate in reflection and discourse. Immersion also cannot happen if appropriate mediums of communication are not present to support the construction of meaning.
Teacher Presence: Teachers need to be available to design, facilitate, and guide reflection, discourse, and meaning making. Immersion can perhaps happen without teacher contribution, but inexperienced learners need some guidance on which ponds of knowledge to immerse themselves in!
Social Presence: This presence is perhaps the closest in its definition to the relationship between identity and presence described in the section on “The role of Personhood and Identity in Immersion”. It is:
“The ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.” http://communitiesofinquiry.com.
The projected personality in this definition is very similar to the projected identity in Gee, J. P. (2003). And the ability to project one's personality and identity into an online environment requires as we discussed earlier, the environment and virtual personality to be immersing to a degree that one feels compelled to do so.
And finally …
What is clear from our understanding of the three presences required to form communities of inquiry, is that they are extremely important for effective motivational education in online learning, and cannot function properly if the participants (students and teachers), as well as the environment and technology used, do not combine forces to create environments that are immersing.
Category: E-Learning
