Theoretical Challenges for Distance Education in the 21st Century: A Shift from Structural to Transactional Issues.

I found a really interesting article by Garrison:

Garrison, R. (2000). Theoretical Challenges for Distance Education in the 21st Century: A Shift from Structural to Transactional Issues. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 1(1), 1-17.

This was the same your that CoI was published. This article kind of feels like their warm up to that article. Saba (2005) and Garrison note that distance education is full of confusion due in part to its rapid growth and the development of new terms. He notes "that theoretical frameworks and models are essential to long-term credibility and viability of a field of practice." The need for credibility reminded me of the quote from Davies, Howell, and Petrie (2010) that distance education has a “deep-rooted insecurity within the distance learning community—a fear that distance education is regarded as a somewhat substandard and less valued educational practice” (p. 44). Garrison says that theory is important to provide credibility, guide future developments, describe what is, help predict what will be, provide understanding for effective action to researchers and practitioners, and reduce complexity while still maintaining the ability to generalize. Cavanaugh et al. (2009) also stated that the "fundamental challenge in this relatively new educational field for program developers, managers, and instructors is locating guidance." A good framework would provide this guidance.

Although in class we use the terms synonymously, he also distinguishes a theoretical framework from a theory in that a theory is more complete and a framework/model is a "less abstract form of a theory and represents structural relationships among the key concepts. It is a replica and often provides visual simplicity that can be grasped at a glance." (p. 3-4)

Another Garrison article said that CoI is "generic in that it is conceptually grounded in theories of teaching and learning in higher education." Does that mean that its main focus is on higher education? I also thought that it was interesting that they also feel that CoI should be applied to other non-educational settings. I wonder what that would look like.

One other thing that really stuck out to me in my readings on Community of Inquiry was that it was developed to analyze courses with text based communication. That was really made clear in the 1997 article. That helps to why they first focused on developing a coding system. I was also surprised to read that most research has only examined individual constructs and few have examined the framework as a whole. I found myself doing this social presence.

"The primary issue of concern emerges at the intersection of social and cognitive presence. Students recognize that they are not there for purely social reasons. A sense of community is based upon common purposes and inquiry." (p. 159). This is true. I also agree that social presence can positively influence cognitive presence. They also noted that teacher presence allowed for cognitive presence to thrive. They asked the question if social presence could distract from cognitive presence. I don't know why that would be the case.