Towards a Comprehensive COI based Framework for Online Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Abstract

COVID 19 has affected many areas in our lives, one of most is our educational system. Teachers and students found themselves immersed in online teaching and learning, an explosive experience that they weren’t prepared to. To cope with this new transition and build upon for future online experiences, there was a need to review online frameworks to build upon and propose a comprehensive one. This paper draws on the literature of online learning frameworks mainly the community of inquiry COI framework. The Community of Inquiry framework is a conceptual model that describes the essential elements of a successful online higher education learning experience. Three elements constitute the original framework: Cognitive Presence, Teaching Presence and Social Presence. The literature describes the progress of this framework and recommends adding more elements namely learner, emotional, or technical managerial presences. On the basis of these findings, an integrated comprehensive framework is proposed based on six suggested elements. This online learning comprehensive framework can be used by educators to design and assess online training programs and also to develop tools to measure the perceptions and outcomes online instruction.