In literature, a community of inquiry (CoI) is defined as a group of people who collaboratively engage in critical thinking to construct personal meaning and confirm understanding. Communities of inquiry have been standardised using a theoretical framework, which describes the process of creating a deep and meaningful collaborative learning experience through the development of three facets being social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence. Social presence is defined as the ability of attendees to identify with the community, communicate in trusting environment and develop relationships. Cognitive Presence is defined as the extent to which attendees are able to learning through reflection and discourse. Teaching presence is defined as  the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes.

After having spent some time in reading and learning on this framework and on its application on online or blended teaching and learning, I found the framework to be annoyingly generic to an extent that brought me to wonder whether it can be used in practice or not. In fact, my impression is that this framework revolves around social presence, which I found, as an educator, to be extremely hard to build especially for some specific subjects, let us say technical subjects. Of course I am aware of the tons of researches that successfully used CoI as a pedagogical instrument, but I found these researches to conveniently address specific kinds of subject and students, only.

My skepticism originates from the reflection that I never, to the best of my knowledge, found a research that focuses on the use of CoI for, e.g., teaching math. So this post wants to challenge you to answer the following question.

Could you make a syllabus for a math course using CoI under the following assumptions? The course is an on-campus course with the possibility of remote sessions. The students are first years bachelor students. The number of attendees is expected to be around hundreds.

Hit me with your solution in the comments!