Inquiry into ‘Communities of Inquiry’: Knowledge, Communication, Presence, Community

Abstract

The Community of Inquiry framework, originally developed to describe learning activity in threaded online discussion forms, has had a relatively long and illustrious history – particularly as far as timelines for e-learning and digital media are concerned. This framework has its origin in a series of articles authored by Garrison, Anderson, Rourke and others around the turn of the century. These researchers understood ‘educational communit[ies] of inquiry’ as being ‘group[s] of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding’ (Garrison, 2011, p. 15). These same researchers believed that deep and meaningful learning occurs in such a community through the balanced interaction of three communicative elements or forms of ‘presence’: cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence. The model is also based on a cyclical process of experiential inquiry, which begins with a triggering event or question, and proceeds through processes of exploration, integration and resolution. The model that incorporates these processes and ‘presences’ has subsequently been developed in a number of different directions, particularly as evidenced in the design and application of a Community of Inquiry Survey (e.g. Aubaugh et al, 2008), and in the publication of two monographs focusing on e-learning and blended learning: ELearning in the 21st Century: a framework for research and practice (Garrison, 2011) and Blended Learning in Higher Education: framework, principles, and guidelines (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008). Researchers have sought to both refine and operationalize the central constructs of the Community of Inquiry framework – specifically, cognitive, social and teaching presence – in a number of ways. In early work, this tended to be done through the analysis of transcripts of online discussions, and the categorization of communicative content as social, cognitive or pedagogical/instructional, or as triggering, exploratory, integrative and/or mutually confirming. Augmented by the ‘Community of Inquiry Survey’ and a number of other adaptations of the model to synchronous, non-textual and other instructional contexts, the three types of presence remain a central concern to this day. As a result, in issuing the original call for papers for this special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media, we as co-editors placed special emphasis on revisiting the Community of Inquiry framework, and considering how it might be further developed and re-thought in the light of more than 10 years of application and research. This introduction provides an overview of the submissions included in this issue, showing how they are interrelated, and how they reconsider the model for different contexts of communal inquiry. Given the centrality of the three constructs of ‘presence’ for the model, it is not surprising that almost all the articles that appear in this special issue have one or more of these forms of presence as their focus. Also, given that technical and practical developments on the Web in the last 10 years have been dominated by an emphasis on