Creating a Community of Inquiry in Large-Enrollment Online Courses: An Exploratory Study on the Effect of Protocols within Online Discussions

Abstract

It can be difficult to foster focused and effective communication in online discussions within large classes. Implementing protocols is a strategy that may help students communicate more effectively, facilitate their learning process, and improve the quality of their work within online discussions. In this exploratory research study, a protocol was developed and improved over two iterations in a very large undergraduate video-streaming business course (N1=412; N2=450). The discussion instructions were consolidated and adjusted, and design elements such as a grading rubric, exemplary student samples, and due date reminders were added in the second iteration. There were higher perceptions of social, cognitive, and teaching presences in the second iteration, as well as significantly more group cognition within the discussion measured through a Community of Inquiry coding template. Findings suggest that protocols are a potentially useful strategy to manage online discussions in large classes.

Dynamics of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) within a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for In-Service Teachers in Environmental Education

“…Such communication channels can be critical for generating new ideas, forming community, and co-creating knowledge [38], so there are a useful platform for characterizing the nature of the educational experience within the MOOC.…”

The role of learners’ epistemic beliefs in an online Community of Inquiry

“…Vol 50 No 4 2019 (Yang, Quadir, Chen, & Miao, 2016). Researchers have also used CoI to guide the design of online learning experiences such as online tutoring (Feng, Xie, & Liu, 2017) and online discussion protocols (Chen, deNoyelles, Zydney, & Patton, 2017).…”

“…For example, CoI has been used as a lens to examine different online learning contexts such as massive online courses (Kovanović et al ., ) and blog‐based online classes (Yang, Quadir, Chen, & Miao, ). Researchers have also used CoI to guide the design of online learning experiences such as online tutoring (Feng, Xie, & Liu, ) and online discussion protocols (Chen, deNoyelles, Zydney, & Patton, ).…”

The Effect of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Learning Model and Learning Style towards Social Skills

“…Community of Inquiry learning model is one of the learning model that provides opportunity for learners to investigate the learning community to achieve the learning objectives by combining face to face and online (Akyol & Garrison, 2011;Asalla et al, 2014;Nave et al , 2017), their relationship to the emergence of social interaction and social conflict cognitive (Akyol & Garrison, 2011;Garrison, 2019;Padilla & Kreider, 2018). increase understanding of individual (Pratiwi et al, 2016), Increase activity and understanding of the concept of learners (Chen et al, 2017a;Feng et al, 2017), To interact socially with other learners with the purpose of conducting an investigation, thereby increasing the understanding of learners (Dumitru, 2012;Chen et al, 2017) improve the achievement of students (Munazah et al, 2015), more focused on the topic of the material being studied and dig deeper on the topic through in-depth discussion with students (Arbaugh et al, 2008;Asalla et al, 2014;Feng et al, 2017) learners should be given a lot of space to use their environment as a learning resource, such as providing internet services, adequate library, facilities for discussion with peers, teachers and other learning resources, because the learners should play an active role in learning (Branch & Kopcha, 2014;Felder & Brent, 2017;Reigeluth, 2016).…”