Exploring the relationships among the dimensions of a community of inquiry in an online learning environment

Abstract

The community of inquiry contends that meaningful learning occurs in the interaction among the teaching, social, and cognitive presences. Although studies have validated the close relationships among the three presences, the roles of teaching presence indicators in students’ social and cognitive presences need to be further explored. Therefore, 592 Chinese college students were investigated through an online questionnaire. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the collected data. Results demonstrate that the three indicators of teaching presence accounted for 56.9% of social presence and 53.4% of cognitive presence. Specifically, design and organization, and discourse facilitation had significantly positive correlations with social presence, while there was no significant correlation between direct instruction and social presence. Additionally, design and organization, discourse facilitation, and direct instruction had significantly positive correlations with cognitive presence. Results indicate that different indicators of teaching presence play different roles in students’ social and cognitive presences.

Keywords:

• teaching presence
• indicators
• social presence
• cognitive presence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was declared by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62107023), the Humanities and Social Sciences Program of the Ministry of Education (No. 21YJC880076), the Philosophy and Social Science Research project of Jiangsu Higher Education (No. 2021SJA0247), and Natural Science Research Project of Jiangsu Higher Education Institution (No. 21KJB120012), and the project of the 14th Five-Year Plan of Jiangsu Provincial Education Science (No. JS/2021/GH0111-02646).

Notes on contributors

Yang Wang

Yang Wang is an assistant professor at in the School of Educational Science at Nanjing Normal University and a visiting scholar at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include instructors’ teaching presence and learning analytics.