As a person with my head in the stiff natural sciences I can sometimes find text and wording about pedagogic theories difficult to understand. There are so many sentences explaining the same thing! At least that is how I perceive it. So I often have to “translate” the pedagogic texts into something I can grasp. I had to do that with the Community of Inquiry, or “the CoI”, like you say if you are cool and in the business. Which I am not so to me this is translated into “Three things for a successful learning environment”. So the three things you need for fulfilling this is cognitive, social and teaching presence. These all have fancy definitions to which I did a “The CoI for dummies” translation. Behold!

Cognitive presence

“Cognitive presence is the extent to which the participants in any particular configuration of a community of inquiry are able to construct meaning through sustained communication.”

Or – the students can understand the content and can use it

Social presence

“Social presence is the ability of learners to project their personal characteristics into the community of inquiry, thereby presenting themselves as ‘real people.’”

Or – the students get to know each other

Teaching presence

“Teaching presence is defined as the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educational worthwhile learning outcomes.”

Or – the course is outline so that the students find it meaningful and can understand the relevance of the content.

It may be a simplification of the theory but after translating the complicated definitions it all makes sense, seems less intimidating and something I can store in my brain and use.

 “The Community of Inquiry”.Athabasca University 2014.

https://coi.athabascau.ca/