Designing Activities for Online Geography Courses Informed by the Community of Inquiry Framework

Though there has been debate regarding the effectiveness of online teaching and learning as compared to face-to-face or in-person modalities, the online experience has gained credence and momentum (Brenneman and Karpman 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant global lockdown warranted the closing of schools and the adoption of online teaching and learning (Zhao 2020). Online learning has become a critical option for continuous education; however, many teachers and students were unprepared for the abrupt shift from in-person teaching and learning to a fully digital and online environment, and this shift resulted in many challenges. Challenges indicated by the literature for online learning include lack of access to technology tools and skills (Beaunoyer, Dupéré, and Guitton 2020; Brenneman and Karpman 2020), creating accessible content that meets the learning needs of all students (Coombs 2010; Bagoly‐Simó, Hartmann, and Reinke 2020), feelings of isolation and low morale (Baker and Watson 2014; Chametzky 2021; Elliott 2020; Schultz and DeMers 2020), and building an online community (Ferri, Grifoni, and Guzzo 2020; Vesely, Bloom, and Sherlock 2007). Pham et al. (2021) described how feelings of isolation threaten students’ well-being, which may impact academic performance. Creating spaces to connect personally and cognitively is important for fostering educationally meaningful experiences to the learners in a community (Bektashi 2018). The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer 2000; Carrillo and Flores 2020; Ferdig et al. 2020) provides an immediate lens for the concept of presence through which to address the challenges of isolation, low morale, and absence of community-building. Active online learning environments where teaching, social, and cognitive presence are high comprise students and instructors sharing ideas, engaging in activities, and interacting with the learning community (Picciano 2017). The CoI framework provides a structure regarding the concept of presence to identify and implement meaningful engagement strategies (Choo et al. 2020). The authors of this article include a professor and three doctoral students at a university in the southwestern United States. We consider the high diversity in enrollment at this university an important factor for enhancing online courses with culturally responsive teaching strategies (Gay 2010; Woodley et al. 2017). We work as a team to collaborate and create an innovative design for an educational technology course taught online for preservice teachers (Chatterjee and Parra 2020). This course is designed and taught based on research about teaching preservice teachers and includes the goal of building communities of inquiry. We merge research of communities of inquiry with research about teaching preservice teachers, which includes the need for a practice-based approach. Within this convergence, future teachers experience the strategies and practice with the tools that they are expected to use in their own classrooms (Parra, Woodley, and Lucero 2018), and the course and content are such that the activities designed are relevant across grade levels and content fields. Additionally, we include activities in our courses that provide opportunities for inclusivity wherein students are encouraged to express and share their unique life experiences based on their linguistic, cultural, traditional, and religious differences (Woodley et al. 2017). Attuned to the above needs, we commit to inclusive, diverse, and socially just curriculum design and delivery phases. The purpose of this article is to describe the activities from the educational technologies course that we redesigned to guide geography teachers in building community in their online courses. The design of these activities was informed by the CoI framework. Later parts of this article include literature for the CoI framework and Building Community in Geography online courses. In another section, we share the descriptions of the activities that we agreed are the most critical and relevant for fostering collaboration and building community in online courses; some of them are redesigned with a geography focus. In the Appendix, we share the activities and the modifications for the online geography courses. Of note, further redesign may be needed to individually fine-tune activities.