Designing Scholarly Conversations to Promote Cognitive Presence and Knowledge Building: An Exploratory Study From an Online Graduate Course

In this exploratory study, a pedagogical intervention, called Scholarly Conversation, was designed and implemented with 26 students in an online graduate course at a public, comprehensive university in the United States. Applying the frameworks of community of inquiry and knowledge building, this paper explains the specific learning goals and design features of Scholarly Conversation. A coding scheme was developed from the conversation text data generated by a high-performing and a low-performing group of the class to describe how learners carried out Scholarly Conversations. Through group comparison, several elements were identified to explain the between-group differences on performance. Particularly, it was found that the two groups distributed their efforts differently during Scholarly Conversations. This study has implications for the design principles for the future Scholarly Conversations.