6 Define Your Learning Community
When you join an online course, you become part of what is known as a Community of Inquiry.
In the Community of Inquiry, you will have a Professor, content to process, and a learning community in which to grow.
This is a learning community that fosters your learning (cognitive growth) in a way that allows you to apply new insights to your life and work. Within a Community of Inquiry, learners have two key roles:
- Maintaining a cognitive presence in the community. This requires a continual process of critical thinking.
- Developing a social presence in the learning community. This involves creating open and mutual relationships that allow for learning and collaboration to occur.
Cognitive Presence and Critical Thinking
The best kind of learning involves constructing new knowledge in a learning community.
This requires interacting with new information (for example, from readings, discussions, videos, and lectures). You may receive this information from professors, from fellow students, or by searching for it to solve questions or problems. Then, together with your learning community, you make connections between this new knowledge and your prior experiences. You also determine how this new knowledge will shape your professional practice.
The Community of Inquiry supports this process through the exchange of ideas, supporting one another in exploring connections, and challenging ways of thinking through thoughtful questioning.
Social Presence
If learning occurs in a collaborative community, how does this take place online?
Maintaining a social presence in an online environment involves allowing for open communication. Social presence allows you to risk expressing your ideas online, based on the knowledge that your classmates will be respectful and supportive. All members of the community commit to supporting each other in their learning.