Social construction of knowledge and the community of inquiry framework

Abstract

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework is a social constructivist model of learning processes in online educational environments. It views learning in such settings as supported by three interacting presences: cognitive presence, the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning in a virtual community of inquiry; social presence, the ability of participants in an online class to project themselves socially and emotionally and correspondingly to perceive each other as “real”; and teaching presence, the design and organization of online classes and the facilitation of learning and direct instruction within them. The presences are commonly measured through content analysis and the use of the CoI survey and the framework has been used around the world to inform both research and practice.