There are three types of presences articulated in Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s (2000), Community of Inquiry model (CoI). They are social which is learner focused and is identified as the ability of students to project themselves as real people; cognitive which is reflected in how much meaning and knowledge is acquired through reflection, evaluation and discourse, again by the learner. Finally, the teaching presence directs the attention to the design, and delivery of content matter.
My focus today is on teaching presence, because I am a teacher and despite many weeks spent on the ONL course I still subscribe to the notion that development of the social and cognitive presence rests primarily on the teaching presence. In other words, I come back to the beginning,as I believe the teaching presence is the fulcrum that enables and facilitates the growth of both the social and cognitive presence. But before the explanation, I include a caveat that a teaching presence is not the same as a teacher’s presence. While the first may not be seen or even heard, his/her presence is felt right through from the conception to delivery and evaluation of a course and its material, in contrast, the later is often called a teacher or facilitator of the course and is a visible entity.
The role of teaching presence is “to design and integrate the cognitive and social elements of a community of inquiry for educational purposes” (Garrison et al., 2000, p. 92). A teaching presence is not simple a conduit of information. In order to encourage growth of a cognitive presence, it is essential that content, knowledge, skills, applications, tools are all built for understanding. It requires the teaching presence to provide, plan, design and execute both the content and the evaluation of a subject (Shea et al., 2003).
While the present pandemic saw most of us reframing and reconfiguring our slides and material for online classes, the point is if there is no teaching presence the cognitive presence will struggle quite a bit. The teaching presence directs the learning. It does not need a physical presence that has knowledge and skills, but the teaching presence is felt from planning of the content, its mode of delivery and what kind of tools are to be used and how it is evaluated. All this is done seamlessly. Thus, the selection of the material, direction of the activities, delivery and finally the evaluation is conducted and coordinated by a teaching presence.
Next, whatever be the learning outcome teaching presence is felt when there is community built through creation of opportunities to engage the learners. This may be done through direct teaching when the teacher shares subject expertise, is able to detect gaps in the learners’ knowledge, provide feedback and also direct reflexive learning (Baker, 2004). While enhancement of the cognitive presence is a given, what it does I believe is engage the learner in higher order thinking skills which requires a recursive activity of understanding assumptions of what is expected and the value of what is being learnt.
The content knowledge is the facts and figures, but developing social presence requires the students to study the backgrounded and foregrounded information presented to the students as cues. The only way a learner moves from developmental ability to expertise is if (s)he pays attention to the teaching presence. Thus, the social presence allows the student to decode the cues given through the teaching presence.
I suggest that despite the very open learning opportunities provided in blended/ online classes the teaching presence is the heart of the CoI model. Thus, when I see Venn diagrams of the three presences, I am not fully satisfied with the visual representation. I instead suggest that the teaching presence be the heart of CoI-this way we have erudite cognitive presence and astute social presences developed by learners.
References:
Baker, J. D. (2004). An investigation of relationships among instructor immediacy and affective and cognitive learning in the online classroom. Internet and Higher Education, 7, 1 – 13.
Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T., and Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and higher education, 2, 87–105.
Shea, P. J., Fredericksen, E. E., Pickett, A. M., & Pelz, W. E. (2003). A preliminary investigation of“teaching presence” in the SUNY learning network. In J. Bourne, & J. C. Moore (Eds.), Elements of quality online education: Practice direction, vol. 4 (pp. 279 – 312). Needham, MA7Sloan Center for OnLine Education.
