Interrelationships between/among CoI Elements

[D. Randy GarrisonKey Master]

I wanted to comment on Kadir Kozan and Jennifer Richardson’s article exploring the interrelationships between the elements of the CoI framework that has been accepted for publication in The Internet and Higher Education. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751613000511

This is a very interesting study that helps us think through the interdependence between and among social, cognitive and teaching presence. However, I would like to focus on one aspect of the findings related to social presence. For a number of years I have argued that “there is much to understand with regard to the construct itself [social presence] and its relationship to the other presences” (Garrison, 2011, p.35). Moreover, I suggested a slightly revised definition of social presence to reflect the development of social presence in a purposeful learning environment where identifying with the academic goal of the group has a much stronger influence on the cohesion and open communication than the socio-emotional categories of social presence (Garrison, 2009; Garrison, 2011).

In the Kozan and Richardson study that explored social presence with working professionals, they found that the “results do not align with the theoretical and empirical assumption that social presence is the mediating presence between teaching presence and cognitive presence.” The interpretation of this is interesting in that it appears to support my argument that the priority for participants in a formal course of study is with the academic purpose and goals. Consistent with this, the present study found a “large and positive partial correlation between cognitive presence and social presence” while controlling for teaching presence. That is, the academic activities (cognitive presence) appeared to be producing the social presence. For this group of working professionals, the authors argued that interpersonal interactions were established “primarily for learning purposes.” Personal relationships would result largely as a byproduct of the purposeful academic transaction and not simply for socio-emotional reasons.

The implication for me is that we should not be focusing too much on the socio-emotional or interpersonal relations at the outset of a course of studies. The social presence emphasis should be on cohesion (common purpose) and open communication (trusting environment); let the interpersonal relationships evolve naturally.

I welcome your thoughts.

DRG

 Garrison, D. R. (2009). Communities of inquiry in online learning. In P. L. Rogers, Berg, G. A., Boettcher, J. V., Howard, C., Justice, L., & Schenk, K. D. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of distance learning (2nd ed.) (pp. 352-355). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Garrison, D. R. (2011). E-Learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice (2nd ed.). London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis.

[Kadir KozanParticipant]

Greetings…

Thank you for your insightful comments, Dr Garrison. I just wanted to highlight a point that would relate to the interrelationships between and among the presences closely: time. In Kozan & Richardson (2014), we collected our data at the end of each online course. Therefore, even though completing the survey may have reflected participants` perceived level of presence over the 8-week semesters retrospectively quite well, it would be interesting to see whether our findings would more relate to the end point of the, say, development of presence interrelationships. In this sense, it would be effective to see how those bivariate and partial correlations would look like at least both at the beginning and end of an online learning experience.

best,
kadir

Kozan, K., & Richardson, J. (2014). Interrelationships between and among social, teaching, and cognitive presence. The Internet and Higher Education, 21, 68-73.

[D. Randy GarrisonKey Master]

Kadir,
Thank you for your post. You raise an interesting and complex issue.
The learning experience in a CoI is dynamic. That is, the emphasis in each presence changes over time as well as the relationships among the presences. I believe it would be more than worthwhile to map the changes among the presences over time and according to the nature of the learning tasks. I believe this is is the issue that you and Jennifer raised in your article?
I would add that I do not see the findings in your article as contradictions but instead reflecting particular circumstances in the learning experience. We have shown that SP does shift over time. I suspect it will also shift depending on the learning task as well.
Cheers,
DRG

[Kadir KozanParticipant]

Dr Garrison,

Thank you for your informative messages as well. I think that involving learning tasks in the development/evolution of presences is a great contribution to the discussion. Following your emphasis on getting social presence to serve learning more aligns fully with this idea. In our article, we did not specifically raise this point (i.e., learning tasks) but assumed that learning itself would speak more to the needs of our participants compared with social interactions, thus letting cognitive presence govern the relationship between teaching presence and social presence. In other words, we assumed that social presence might have served achieving their learning purposes. Regarding individual learning tasks, I am also inclined to think that task complexity would turn out to be an important variable in that tasks would need to be complex enough (in terms of either successful completion or amount of time needed or both) to be solved by a group of learners (compared with tasks that can be done by individuals alone), which would influence formation of a community of inquiry.

best,
kadir

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