COI Infographic

Community of Inquiry in K to 12 Online Learning

Strategies for developing learning presence, social presence, and teaching presence in an online learning environment, such as e-portfolios.

Social Presence

Learning Presence

Teaching Presence

Teaching presence refers to "Teaching presence is explained as the effort and activity around the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes in learning communities created to foster inquiry, for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning" (Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes-, Garrison, 2013) .

Teachers can help to develop teacher presence by:

• Rview and reinforce class expectations
• Modelling each presence
• Providing varying opportunities for students to engage in the community and content.

Social presence refers to how students interact among the learning community.

To develop social presence facilitators can:

• Introduction: Have each community member (learners and facilitator(s) post a picture of their favourite summer activity
• In small groups have students explain photographs and find connections with each learner in the small group.
• Collaboratively develop expectations for our learning community.
• Have students reply in the form of "I learned" or "I wonder" in reply to peers posts.

Learning presence refers to the ability and effort for learners to cognitively interact and inquire with learning content.

To develop learning presence, teachers can:

• Model inquiry by asking questions
• In small groups have students present varying perspectives on the content
• Create a board where students share resources (in various forms of media)