Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment

Here are my notes from Walter Archer’s session at the Saskatoon ID conference. This is basically just a notes dump, without bothering to pretty it up (lack of wireless access at the conference forced me to do notes in a text editor instead of straight blogging)

See http://www.communitiesofinquiry.com for paper’s that he refers to.

Walter’s experience with online teaching goes back to 1988.

The community of inquiry model includes:
* Social presence,
* teaching presence
* cognitive presence.
* how these interact and intersect

Notes some skepticism about the usefulness of this model, but decided not to cancel since Dirk Morrison used it in his present’n :^)

Main purpose of higher learning is to acquire critical thinking, so how is this done in an online environment.

The original project was done by Terry Anderson, Randy Garrison, and Walter Archer. Liam Rourke also became part of the research group. Used content analysis as a primary research method (described well this morning by Dirk Morrison). Content analysis is easy to apply to online learning.

Bing!!! – how do weblogs allow for a greater degree of social presence? Cognitive presence (especially in the integration and resolution phases)? Teaching presence?

Relevance of this study:
* could make use of this model by presenting it to the students. Make higher level thinking an explicit objective, and show students how this proceeds within the model.
** provoke metacognition to recognize how the process of the course matches these higher level thinking objectives.
* quick and dirty coding of a segment of the course for a snapshot of what is happening. Allows for formative evaluation.
* Group at SUNY used teaching presence segment as part of staff professional development
** found correlation between good teaching presence and student reports of course satisfaction

Too much *teacher* presence can impede *teaching* presence. Use of students as discussion moderators can allow the teacher to fade into the background a bit more.