Learning presence within the Community of Inquiry framework: An alternative measurement survey for a four-factor model

Abstract

Within the distance education community, the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework is widely accepted as a framework to understand and design text-based learning environments. The framework includes three components: Cognitive Presence, Teaching Presence, and Social Presence. Recent work has proposed the addition of a fourth component, Learning Presence, which reflects students' self-regulation, and its role within the original framework. This study evaluated alternative structures of the COI framework to explain student perceptions of learning online. The study participants (n = 256) were graduate students from multiple institutions who had taken at least one fully online course as part of their degree requirements. Survey data were collected using a single Likert-scaled survey instrument. Presented herein are the results of the first phase of a two-part study, which included a series of confirmatory factor analyses to evaluate the measurement models of the four COI constructs individually, followed by a model including all four constructs simultaneously. Future work on the second phase of the this two-part study evaluated a series of structural models using path analyses and hierarchical linear regression analyses. Findings indicated that teaching presence reached a more parimonious model with two subscales as opposed to the three subscales of the COI survey. A new subscale "peer faciliation" was proposed for teaching presence, but had better model fit as a subscale of social presence. The three existing subscales of social presence could also more parsimoniously represented with two subscales, with the new "peer faciliation" subscale acting as the third. Finally, learning presence was modeled with three subscales, and was the strongest overall predictor of cognitive presence, compared to teaching and social presence. This work makes unique contributions to the study of online learning environments through the COI framework by introducing a comprehensive survey that includes Learning Presence indicators, producing evidence on the multi-dimensionality of the COI constructs, and the strong relationship between Learning Presence and Cognitive Presence.