Well, friends, it’s time for my once-per-year post! The delay was not intentional, but I’m glad to have an excuse to reconnect with you.
I’m returning to the practice of sharing the slides and handouts from professional development sessions that are offered for free to educators. Today I have the wonderful opportunity to facilitate a session for the FY25 OSSE Adult and Family Education (AFE) & UDC Mini-Professional Development (PD) Institute on the fun topic of Communities of Inquiry (CoI).
CoI is a framework used by educators and education researchers to understand and improve how students experiences education, especially in remote or asynchronous settings. There are three essential elements: cognitive, teaching, and social presence.
For more information and guided reflection on this topic, you can download the slides in PDF format.
Live participants used a shared Google Doc to reflect on how to build Cognitive Presence, Social Presence and Teaching Presence in our work, particularly thinking about students who are participating asynchronously. Even if asynchronous (anywhere, any time) learning is not intended in the design of the program, the reality is that many adult education programs struggle with low attendance. This is increasingly true of K-12 education as well, and many educators can feel defeated or frustrated by all the barriers that cause learners to miss essential materials.
While we can’t control everything going on in a learner’s life, we can control how we deliver the material we are teaching. Designing for learning that can be completed by students in the classroom, live remote and asynchronous (while watching recordings, etc.) is beneficial for everyone! CoI provides a helpful framework to think about how educators can keep learners engaged and on-track by offering clear tasks to stay connected with the content (cognitive presence), their teacher (teaching presence) and fellow students (social presence).
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