Regulation of learning as distributed teaching presence in the Community of Inquiry framework

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model and framework, proposed by R. Garrison and T. Anderson, among others, is one of the most researched models of online education since the last decade. It states that on online educational collaborative constructivist experience is a product of three elements of the learning community: Social Presence, Cognitive Presence and Teaching Presence. One distinguishing trait of the model is the way it dissociates the actor and the function. It refers Teaching Presence and not Teacher Presence. That means that the teaching function may be exerted by other participants, becoming a distributed function not exclusive of the teacher in a formal online educational setting. This distribution may be intentionally framed in the teacher´s instructional design (for example by peer moderation activities) but may also emerge naturally from the cooperative and collaborative interactions between the students as they pursue their social learning in the virtual environment.

A forth element of the model (Learning Presence) that tried to account for the occurrence of interactions expressing learners’ self- and co-regulation processes has been recently proposed but was not accepted by all CoI researchers. In these regulating behaviors we have found evidence of what might be, not a forth element of the model but another component of Teaching Presence. In their original form, the CoI framework proposed Design and Organization, Facilitation of Discourse and Direct Instruction as categories of Teaching Presence. We propose that when the participants in the learning community regulate each other’s learning processes, mainly in group work activities, they exert (distributed) Teaching Presence in a way not previously addressed by the CoI framework. In this paper we will propose Regulation of Learning as a forth category of Teaching Presence, the rationale that supports the proposal, the indicators that compose the category and results of a study where this enhanced Teaching Presence construct was used to analyze the online interactions.