The Relationships Between Students’ Perceived Learning Styles and the Community of Inquiry Presences in a Graduate Online Course

Hasnae Mouzouri

doi:10.3991/ijet.v11i04.5312

Abstract

In this paper, the author examined whether there is any correlation between students’ perceived learning styles as identified by Felder and Silverman (2002) and each of the three presences of the Garrison et al.’s Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (2000): the teaching presence, the social presence and the cognitive presence. First, the CoI survey was administered to a sample of Master’s students (N=24) at the University Mohamed First in Morocco. Then transcript analysis of online discussion postings was investigated to explore the links of the three presences of the CoI framework with students’ self-perceptions of personal learning style preferences. Analysis of the data collected from these instruments revealed significant relationships between students’ perceived learning styles with regard to some domains of the Felder and Silverman’s model and only two presences of the CoI framework: the social and cognitive presences. The findings have important implications for how to design online courses in a way that fits students’ needs and thus foster effective learning.

Highlights

In the past few years, a vast movement towards the development of online courses in Moroccan universities has been initiated
The correlational analysis, as shown in table IV, revealed that there was a positively significant relationship between social presence and the learning style domain related to perception of information (r=.547, p=.010), and a negatively significant relationship between social presence and the learning style domain concerned with processing of information (r= -.503, p=.020)
The correlational analysis of the numbers of messages for each presence in relation to students’ perceived learning styles with regard to the four domains of Felder and Silverman’s model indicates a significant relationship between the numbers of messages related to cognitive presence and perception of information (r=.448, p=.042), between the numbers of messages related to cognitive presence and information processing (r= - .622, p=.003)

Summary

Introduction

In the past few years, a vast movement towards the development of online courses in Moroccan universities has been initiated This movement has opened the door for the implementation of several e-learning projects at a national level. This reflects universities’ efforts to introduce ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in their programs for improving the quality of education. Instructors and course designers have tried and are still trying to use theoretical and practical frameworks to ensure the effectiveness of their online programs Among these frameworks, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, developed by Garrison et al (2000) [1, 2], has been adopted for this study to design, develop and deliver a graduate university online course in our educational context. Our main aim in this paper is to check the relevance of this framework to the students’ needs and explore if the students’ perceived learning styles with regard to the four domains of Felder and Silverman are associated with the Community of Inquiry presences

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion