Thursday 6 October 2016

#edenRW9 Community of Inquiry Framework: new directions and research opportunities

The slides can be found here : tinyurl.com/edenone

Great session focusing on Teacher presence (by MartiCleveland-Innes) and great idea of shared metacognition (by Randy Garrison).

Related to the Community of Inquiry model.

Marti Cleveland-Innes speaks on Community of Inquiry which can be used as a model for different educational settings, both digital and physical.
Interesting idea of moving from teaching to teacher presence, where each one of us can be the teacher in a community.
Context is changing, this means roles are changing. This is more about teaching and learning, making a transition like this can make a significant contribution to the higher educational reform.
Student demographics will change, and with different characteristics. The employment factory demands different graduates (or with other skills).
Pressure on higher ed is not about technology, it is a matrix and technology has an effect on the whole society. The pressure on higher ed is higher than at any other given moment in time.
We are teaching students that are no longer living under the same conditions as when the educational institutes were set up.
CoI is all about creating an educational experience, which can help us with some of the contemporary conditions and pressures.
Drivers for higher education change: the ed institutes need to morph into the current challenges. We shall all be engaging and learning with others collaboratively.
Teaching presence: the design and organisation , facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes to realize personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes. The opportunities for students to participate in each of these components of teaching presence. We can empower the learners and engage them in a way that are meaningful to them.
The best way to measure whether these elements were present or not. There are 4 design and organisation factors: communicating important course topics, clearly communicate important course goals, provide clear instructions on how to participant in course learning activities, communicate… (see slide)
Facilitation is key… identifying areas of agreement and disagreement, guiding the class towards understanding, keep course participants engaged and participating in constructive dialogue, explor new concepts, reinforced the development of a sense of community.
Direct instruction: focus discussion on relevant issues, help to understand strengths and weaknesses, provide feedback in a timely fashion.
Teaching teaching presence: faculty needs to learn, and be given the opportunity to understand the learning. Learning how to teach is through teacher presence, by teaching. The CoI model serves as course design and delivery. Pedagogy involves observing and modelling the online teaching practices of expert distance educators. A high-tech, high-touch approach provides the most effective means of assuring quality student learning and satisfaction.
Translation into practice: critical to impact on higher ed reform is that students will be enabled to play a more active role (purposeful) and faculty realise this. Make students participate in teacher presence, in teaching. Sharing teaching is the most important part of the Community of Inquiry, as well as being emotionally present.

Shared metacognition (Randy Garrison talking)
Thinking and learning collaboratively. Metacognition is central to Inquiry.
Regulating learning (between cognitive and teaching presence) is the situated area for metacognition.
Goal of CoI is constructing another level of awareness.
Explicitly recognizing co-regulating of metacognition, and individual as well as shared learning processes.
Self- and co-regulated functions, each of which include monitoring and managing cognitive and teaching responsibilities. (Inge note: I realllly like this!!!). Shared metacognition.
They did a construct validation pilot study, data from 167 participants, from a 54 item questionnaire. In the final questionnaire the elements were reduced from 54 to 26 items.
Two factor solution analysis was used (looking it up), followed by a four factor analysis conducted to extract monitoring and management subcomponents. Big challenge to separate monitoring from management. Look up references from Garrison and Akyol (2011, 2013, 2015).
Randy promotes shared metacognition as an interesting future research topic.
The questionnaire was built coming from the CoI model. Now, I want to connect to Randy (remark from myself).