13 Community of Inquiry

The Open Education Development Series (OEDS) is facilitated via Canvas course offerings and was constructed with Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s Community of Inquiry (CoI) (2007) model in mind. This framework provided the structure to ensure the mentorship opportunities and collaborative learning experiences we offered to our cohort of faculty participants contributed to deep, purposeful understandings and resulted in creating a community of learners.

In brief, the CoI consists of three overlapping domains of presence:

Social Presence

Social presence refers to the opportunities for learners to connect with others and create purposeful and meaningful relationships. This is supported through communication and group cohesion.

Cognitive Presence

Cognitive presence refers to the opportunities for learners to both construct and reflect on meaning, knowledge, and skill. This is fostered through autonomous exploration and open environments that encourage and welcome diverse perspectives.

Teaching Presence

Teaching presence refers to the role an instructor plays in actively guiding learners through the learning processes and experiences in the course. This can be facilitated in a number of ways in online environments, including but not limited to recorded mini lectures, synchronous office hours, course announcements and weekly overviews, feedback to students, and engagement in discussion boards.

The design and facilitation of the OEDS includes intentional efforts to:

• Provide an organized collection of resources, tools, and strategies aligned to participant outcomes and accompanied by no-stakes assessments for participants to monitor their own understanding of content
• Foster cohort-based collaborations, including discussions that target connections, applications, and reflections of the content
• Offer Individualized support and guidance as participants explore and apply new learnings

Further, our series features expert guest speakers, flexible deadlines, and one-on-one support opportunities to meet the individual needs of our participants and the nature of the projects they elected to pursue. As we continue to offer the OEDS, we look forward to inviting alums of our Series to share their experiences, wisdom, and expertise with our future participants.