Vaughan et al. (2013) positions the ideas of engagement and academic inquiry as central both for higher education and for learning communities, and use the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to discuss blended learning in higher education. Blended learning is usually described as the integration of face-to-face synchronous communication and text-based online asynchronous communication. In my experience the face-to-face part can perfectly well also take place online, using video chat tools. The challenge as a course designer is to take all three elements of CoI into account: social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. Social presence involves creating a safe space that allows for building of trust and communication. Cognitive presence involves becoming engaged in a subject, exploring it and coming to new conclusions. To me, teaching presence manifest in the constructive alignment of learning outcomes and learning activities, in a deliberate and well communicated  structure, available teachers, and opportunities for peer and teacher feedback during the course. A key point of the CoI framework is that teaching presence is not all about teacher presence. In a learning community, various degrees of teaching responsibilities need to be assumed by all participants.

I addition, I also found the concept of emotional presence (Cleveland-Innes, 2019) highly useful for thinking about what I do and what I want to achieve as a teacher. Like it often is, my interest in this was first born out of necessity – to be able to teach a subject without dying of boredom I have to make it interesting and important for myself and for the students. As a teacher and course organizer I can design the course so that students are encouraged to repeatedly connect content to their own experiences and apply it to their own contexts, and also share those connections with each other.  A simple yet learning activity would be to have students read some material, reflect on how that material relates to their own experience, share their reflections in an asynchronous discussion forum, and then read and comment on each others posts. However, as my teaching is mainly within mental health nursing, the perhaps most powerful tool is the involvement of experts by experience (people with experience of mental health problems and mental health services) in education. As demonstrated by Simpson et al. (2008) this can readily be done in online learning. In my own experience, involving user perspectives in the form of online presentations, autobiographies or having experts by experience as co-facilitators in online seminars, is probably the most effective way to engage students emotionally in mental health nursing. I have for example used this video in which Eleanor Longden shares her experience of hearing voices:

I find it interesting that the ideas put forth within the CoI framework align with the thoughts connected with relational pedagogy that I discussed in my blog post on topic 1. To me, this strengthens my belief that relational and emotional aspects always need to be considered in teaching and learning.

References

Cleveland-Innes, M. (2019). Emotion and learning – emotional presence in the Community of Inquiry framework (CoI)? Introductory video on the Padlet

Simpson, A., Reynolds, L., Light, I., & Attenborough, J. (2008). Talking with the experts: Evaluation of an online discussion forum involving mental health service users in the education of mental health nursing students. Nurse education today, 28(5), 633-640.

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press.