ENHANCING SOCIAL PRESENCE ONLINE USING THE COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY

Faculty in an online baccalaureate completion program (RN-BS) identified the need to enhance the support of social presence in their courses. Faculty desired to provide ways to rebalance attention to cognitive, teaching, and social presence as a method to improve the online learning environment.  The Community of Inquiry (CoI) is a framework developed to describe online learning, and is an appropriate guide to online educators when developing courses and course activities (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000).The CoI framework identifies three types of presence essential to developing a community of inquiry: social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. Social presence is defined as showing emotion, being perceived as real and human and encourages self-expression. Teaching presence involves facilitating discourse and instruction, and includes course design. Cognitive presence is the exploration and connection of ideas, where true learning occurs. Social presence is often neglected in course design as compared to teaching and cognitive presence. Without adequate development of social presence students may feel isolated and disconnected from the course, and this disconnection can interfere with student success.

Faculty focused on the redesign of several RN-BS program course activities to provide increased opportunities for social presence. Each new activity was designed to enhance social presence while continuing to support teaching and cognitive presence. Additionally, the activities were developed to incorporate emerging technology that would strengthen the student’s experience. Student course evaluations and faculty feedback showed increased satisfaction as a result of the redesign.

This symposium includes five papers, each paper presenting a particular online learning activity developed by members of the RN-BS team. The first paper presents how faculty, working in collaboration with an instructional designer, can use emerging technologies to redesign course activities that strengthen students’ social presence.   Two papers describe different applications of web-conferencing technology. Paper two describes the implementation of synchronous discussion sessions early in the program that helps students to transition to online learning.  Paper three outlines the implementation of an online virtual simulation, focusing on high-stakes communication and collaboration skills. The fourth paper describes the use of a weekly blog to allow for a more private and collegial exchange between student and faculty, away from the more public group forum discussions. The fifth paper describes the redesign of online forum discussions to increase social presence and promote collegial discourse. Together, these five papers demonstrate the value of the CoI framework and attending to social presence in online education course design.