Community of Inquiry Framework

The community of inquiry framework is a model of online and blended learning developed by researchers D. Randy Garrison, Terry Anderson and Walter Archer, set out in a 1999 paper and refined further in subsequent work, describing effective learning in a computer-mediated educational setting as arising from the interaction of three overlapping presences: cognitive presence, the extent to which learners construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse; social presence, the ability of participants to project themselves as real people and build trusting relationships; and teaching presence, the design, facilitation and direction of the cognitive and social processes by an instructor. The framework was developed to address the challenge of fostering the kind of deep, critical, collaborative thinking associated with in-person seminar discussion within text-based online course environments, where the absence of face-to-face cues had been assumed by some earlier researchers to make such thinking difficult. The model has become one of the most widely cited frameworks in online and distance education research, used both to design online courses and to evaluate the quality of discussion within them.