COVID-19 has impacted nearly every aspect of life and made more visible the myriad domestic, social, political, economic, and educational inequalities that have persisted all over the world. It has also illuminated the importance of teaching and learning, designing effective learning experiences, engaging students in the learning process, and in particular, supporting students—no matter where, how, or when they learn. This became even more evident as P–12 schools and institutions of higher education closed and shifted to emergency remote teaching and learning due to the COVID-19 global health pandemic during the spring of 2020 (Hodges et al., 2020; Milman, 2020a, 2020b). The response to COVID-19 required educators to quickly reconceptualize and redesign their instruction via diverse, remote learning contexts. This was also true for experienced online educators who had to adapt to an emerging and complex set of realities—and still have to as the global health crisis persists.
Although the future successes of online educators may require greater creativity and reliance on technology-mediated instruction for the foreseeable future, as well as reflection on lessons learned during emergency remote teaching and learning, the community of inquiry (CoI) framework (see Figure 1) provides a well-known foundation for designing effective and successful online education. Developed during 1997–2001, the CoI framework (Garrison et al., 2001) emerged through a research project conducted by a group of Canadian researchers (Garrison et al., n.d.). This validated framework (Stenbom, 2018) consists of three major interrelated elements necessary for quality, effective online education, which are social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. Each of these will be defined in the sections that follow.
This special issue consists of several Ends and Means articles that I have written or coauthored and that I have organized using the three major elements of the CoI framework. The last section has articles written by other authors who incorporated CoI.
Section 1: Social Presence—Supporting Students: this section includes articles about how faculty and those who work in institutions of higher education might best support online students, as well as nurture students’ social presence.
Section 2: Cognitive Presence—Engaging Students: this section provides resources and information about how to engage online students, which is critical to fostering cognitive presence.
Section 3: Teaching Presence—Designing for Online Education: this section offers online educators with various tips and resources for designing effective online education and cultivating teaching presence.
Section 4: Distance Learning CoI Articles:this section has five articles authored by other researchers that incorporated the CoI and that were published in Distance Learning. These were selected to show how others have conceptualized the CoI framework in their research and work.
Although the articles in the first three sections are organized according to the three different elements of the CoI framework, a key aspect of the framework is how these elements are interdependent (see Figure 1). Therefore, some articles could also be categorized in another CoI presence. Additionally, there are many resources that provide even more ideas about incorporating CoI (e.g., Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007; Garrison et al., 2010). For example, Fiock (2020) outlines several activities online educators might use to incorporate the CoI and Castellanos-Reyes (2020) wrote an article summarizing the past 20 years of this important framework for online education. It is my hope that these articles will offer readers several strategies and ideas for supporting, designing, and sustaining quality online education as well as for using the CoI framework.
About the author
