Studying a synchronous online course using a community of inquiry framework

Abstract

We studied two iterations of an online course provided to rural mathematics teachers. The online courses, which involved primarily synchronous activity, emphasized high-leverage discourse practices. We applied a community of inquiry framework, which emphasizes deep intellectual work, and its three tenets: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. We adapted the framework by creating a category on content-related interactions and by using mediating processes from our conjecture maps (e.g., Sandoval, 2014) to characterize cognitive presence. The adapted framework allowed us to notice substantive differences between the course iterations, especially in relation to teaching presence and cognitive presence. The implications of the study are that the framework helps us gauge the efficacy of synchronous online interactions and to better gauge goals for future iterations of the course.