Transcript Open University of Israel

Keynote lecture - Chais Conference Feb. 20, 2007
Open University of Israel
Social and Cognitive
Presence in Virtual
Learning Environments
Terry Anderson, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Distance Education
[email protected]

“Canada is a great
country, much too cold
for common sense,
inhabited by
compassionate and
intelligent people with
bad haircuts”.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 2002.
Athabasca University,
Alberta, Canada
Fastest growing university
Canada
34,000 students
700 courses
*
Athabasca University
Athabasca
University
Graduate and
Undergraduate programs
Largest Master of Distance
Education program
Only USA Accredited
University in Canada
in


“An expert is someone more than 500 miles
away from home.” Prairie folk wisdom
"Don't be so humble - you are not that great." –

Golda Meir (1898-1978)
Presentation Overview
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Development and Evolution of the Community
of Inquiry Model
Cognitive Presence
 Social Presence
 Teaching presence
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Validations and Extensions
Methodological weaknesses
COI in a Networked Era
Motivations for the Community of
Inquiry Investigation (1998-2004)
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CMC most widely used tool for interaction in online DE
Need for a bird’s-eye view of the overall learning taking place,
and to respond to that learning, assess it, and intervene.
CMC hype & lack of empirical validation of claims
Need for heuristic guides for both teachers and learners
Desire to exploit affordances:
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Machine readable
Time independent
Reflective power of text
Knowledge hidden in the transcripts
Need for teacher usable tools to assess interventions
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Story of Assistant Prof Jones:
Expectations of
Models and Theories
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Create conceptual order and provide
simplicity (parsimony) in describing and
understanding complex phenomena.
“Science is a way of ordering events.”
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J. Bronowski, Common Sense of Science, 1978
Improve practice through guidelines and
reflection??
MethodologyQuantitative Content Analysis
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“The systematic and replicable examination of symbols of
communication, that have been assigned numeric values according
to valid measurement rules using statistical methods,”
in order to:
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describe communication,
draw inferences about its meaning,
infer from the communication to its context, both of production and
consumption. (p. 22) Riffe, Lacy, and Fico (1998)
quantify impressions
reveal additional insights that are not obvious from superficial reading or
participation.
allow educational researchers to compare, replicate results, increase
understanding.
Internet and
Higher
Education
(2002)
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“This article lays out a conceptual framework
that identifies the elements that are crucial
prerequisites for a successful higher educational
experience.”
199 citations in Goggle Scholar
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Communitiesofinquiry.com
John Dewey - reflective thinking
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"Active, persistent, and careful
consideration of any belief or
supposed form of knowledge
in the light of the grounds
that support it and the further
conclusion to which it tends".
(Dewey, 1933)
Characteristics of a
Community of Inquiry
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Questioning
Reasoning
Connecting
Deliberating
Challenging
Problem Solving
 Mathew Lipman, 2003
“In reality, the reflective model is
thoroughly social and communal.” p. 25
Cognitive Presence
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Definition: The extent to which the participants in any
particular configuration of a community of inquiry are
able to construct meaning through sustained
communication.
From Dewey, practical inquiry
Variation of scientific method
Most latent category
Used full message as unit of analysis
Table I: Practical inquiry descriptors and indicators
PHASE
Triggering Event
DESCRIPTOR
Evocative
(inductive)
INDICATOR
Recognize problem
Puzzlement
Exploration
Inquisitive
(divergent)
Divergence
Info exchange
Suggestions
Brainstorming
Intuitive leaps
Integration
Tentative
(convergent)
Convergence
Synthesis
Solutions
Resolution
Committed
(deductive)
Apply
Test
Defend
Cognitive Presence

“An awareness of the critical thinking and
inquiry dynamic is an essential metacognitive
ability that encourages students:
to approach a problem strategically and
 actively seek out sources of knowledge,
 discover biases,
 sift through the increasingly large quantities of
information now available, and
 formulate and defend their own intellectual
positions.” p. 96
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other
33%
trigger
8%
exploration
42%
resolution
4%
integration
13%
Cognitive Presence Coding Results
– Two Graduate level Courses
Phases of Cognitive Presence
Meyer, K.(2003)Face-to-face versus threaded
discussions: The role of time and higher-order thinking
– JALN 7(3)
Why low rate of
problem resolution?
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Instructional design- no problem to resolve
Poor teacher guidance/assessment
Resolution reflected in final papers/exams or case
studies – not in online discussion
Artificial context of formal learning- no space for real
application
Poor instrumentation or model
Online asynch discussion is not powerful enough to
support full cognitive presence
Takes too much time
Social Presence
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Social presence is defined as "the ability of participants
in a community of inquiry to project themselves
socially and emotionally, as ‘real’ people (i.e. their full
personality), through the medium of communication
being used”
Literature reviewed from “filtered-cues” (Short, et al.
1976) to “hyper-personal” (Walther, 1996).
Most culturally bound of the ‘presences’
“social-emotional literacy appears to be the most
complicated of all types of digital literacy”
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(Eshet, 2004)
Cohesive Behaviours
Vocatives
Addresses or refers to the group using
inclusive pronouns
Phatics, salutations
Interactive Behaviours
Continuing a thread
Quoting from others’ messages.
Referring explicitly to others’ messages.
Asking questions
Complimenting, expressing
appreciation
Expressing agreement
Affective Behaviours
Expression of emotions
Use of humor
Self-disclosure
Transcript A
Transcript B
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Interactive
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Affective
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social presence density
8
Cohesive
6
4
2
0
Social Presence Confirmation
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Rourke and Anderson (2000) an increase in the
perceived frequency (survey results) of 7 of the 15
social expressions corresponded significantly to more
positive ratings of the social environment.
The 7 social expressions included addressing others by
name, complimenting, expressing appreciation, using the reply
feature to post messages, expressing emotions, using humor, and
salutations.
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“We argue that cognitive presence …is more
easily sustained when a significant degree of
social presence has been established”
Boot camps (F2F) and profiles
 Value of real time interaction?
 Aided by systems that support photos of
participants?
 SecondLife? Value of expressions and avatars?
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Comparing COI
Online vs Face-to-Face
Heckman & Annabi (2005) JCMC 10(2)
Teaching Presence
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Defined as: The design, facilitation and direction of
cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing
personally meaningful and educational worthwhile
learning outcomes.
Built upon the familiar models of Moore,
Holmberg, Paulsen, and Mason, however
provide ways to measure the construct.
Teaching Presence
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The transcript analysis allows researcher to
disaggregate the roles
Instructional designer and activity organizer
 Discourse facilitator
 Subject matter expert
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Especially critical in computer conferencing
(asynch text) based education systems
Major cause of course breakdown.
Category
Instructional design
& organization
Indicator
Setting curriculum
Designing methods
Establishing time parameters
Utilizing medium
Netiquette
Macro-level comments about
course content
Category
Facilitating
discussion
Indicator
Identifying areas of
agreement/disagreement
Seeking to reach
consensus/understanding
Encouraging, acknowledging,
reinforcing contributions
Setting climate for learning
Drawing in participants,
prompting discussion
Assess the efficacy of the process
Category
Direct Instruction
Indicator
Present content
Focus the discussion on specific
issues
Summarize the discussion
Confirm understanding through
assessment and explanatory
feedback.
Diagnose misconceptions
Inject knowledge from diverse
sources, e.g., textbook, articles,
internet, personal experiences
Teaching Presence results:
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Instructional
Design
Facilitating
Discourse
Direct
Instruction
Education
Course
Health
Course
Percentage of instructor messages
Percentage of instructor messages
with multiple functions
Health Promotions
0
1
2
3
Cat.
Cat.
Cat.
Cat.
Education Course
0 Cat
1 Cat.
2 Cat.
3 Cat.
Teacher Presence
Correlated with perception of learning and learner
satisfaction:
Satisfaction
Learning
Instructional
.64
.60
design
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facilitating
discourse
.61
.58
Direct instruction
.63
.61
Shea, Pickett, & Pelz (2003) A FOLLOW-UP INVESTIGATION OF “TEACHING
PRESENCE” IN THE SUNY LEARNING NETWORK. JALN 7(3)
Teaching Presence & Peer
Moderating
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Peer teams (3-4 persons) moderated
conferences last half of graduate course
Higher levels of all three indicators of teacher
presence than instructor!
Many more moderator postings by peers
Shows value of sharing and delegating teaching
presence
Interviews found insufficient probing by peer
facilitators – too much share and compare
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Rourke and Anderson, 2002, JIME
Teaching presence and Peer Moderating
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De Laat & Lally (2003) Complexity, theory and praxis: Researching collaborative
learning and tutoring processes in a networked learning community Instructional
Science 31: 7–39, 2003.
“14 of the 26 instances of Teaching Process (54%) in the average ALN
discussion were performed by students. In the average FTF discussion,
however, only 8 of 148 instances of Teaching Process (5%) were performed
by students. “Heckman & Annabi (2005) JCMC 10(2)
Additions to Our
Work on Presences
Emotional Presence
“The extent to which learners and teachers
transform their behaviour to accomodate the
overt and covert presence of emotion”
Campbell and Cleveland-Innes, 2004
Affect in the Community of Inquiry Model, Masters
thesis Athabasca University
Emotional Presence
Marti Clevland-Innes and Prisca Campbell (2005)
We had included emotional presence as a
component of social presence
 Did not allocate emotional as a distinct presence
But we are REAL men!
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Student Presence
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Students’ perceptions of the presence they had
in the class were significantly correlated with the
teacher’s assessment of their performance in the
class, with the grade they would assign
themselves, and with their attitudes about the
course.
Learning with Invisible Others: Perceptions of Online Presence
and their Relationship to Cognitive
T Russo, S Benson - Educational Technology & Society, 2005
PLE’s
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“The logic of education systems should be
Downes, 2006
reversed so that it is the system that conforms to
the learner, rather than the learner to the
system.” Futurelab Personalisation and Digital
Technologies Green et al 2005
LSA and Neural Net
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McKlin et al (2004) used our
Cognitive presence indicators
with 182 General Inquirer
categories and set of our key
words to train a neural
network.
Good results, with comparable
reliability to human coders.
Need for more work using
Neural nets, Latent Semantic
Analysis and other automated
techniques.
Image: omobb.oasysmobile.com
COI Validation – Factor analysis
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Garrison, Cleveland-Innes & Fung (2004)
Student role adjustment in online communities
of inquiry: Model and instrument validation
Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks,
2004
Confirmed students role clustered into three
presences
COL used as a model for application
analysis
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Of a role playing simulation MEKONG e-SIM
www.adelaide.edu.au/clpd/materia/publication/
confpapers/ICET2004paper.pdf.
To compare Blogs and Threaded discussions.
Anderson, 2006
Currently developing indicators for virtual
worlds - SecondLife
Informal Blogged Support
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“I think I'm actually applying their framework already
by default, one of the great things about good models is
that you don't really need to apply them - you just find
yourself doing it. I think that Garrison and Anderson's
model is descriptive rather than prescriptive in this
regard.” Mark Nichols
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Blog http://www2.blogger.com/profile/05666493097199544658
Is Text Analysis Worth it?
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“The preliminary application of our coding
template using the indicators reveal that it is a
useful method for identifying, assessing, and
facilitating cognitive, social, and teaching
presence in asynchronous, text-based computer
conferencing.”
Reliability and validity ?????
Methodology Reflections:
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Unit of Analysis
What segment of the transcript will coders
categorize?
 Whole posting, sentence, paragraph, phrase?
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CMC communication is idiosyncratic
 variables often do not organize themselves into syntactic
packages—paragraphs, postings too long, sentences,
phrases too short.
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How reliably can unit itself be identified?
Units of Analysis
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Message?
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Thematic Unit?
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manageable data set,
objectively identifiable by coders, but often too large
useful when it encompasses the variable
a single item of information in its natural form
most commonly used unit of analysis
unreliable, coders are not alerted to the need for a
decision.
Speech Turn?
Grammatical indicator?
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Sentence, paragraph, utterance –
Paragraph description in Wikipedia is over 600 words –
from one word to pages of text!
Software to Aide Analysis
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Qualitative analysis software
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NUD*IST, Hyperqual, Atlas-ti
facilitates coding process both autocode and manually
 Simple statistics and export
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Quantitative analysis software
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SPSS
facilitates assessment of interrater agreement
 Presentation of descriptive statistics
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Ethics
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Research participants
“individuals about whom a scholar obtains data
through intervention or interaction”
 identifiable private information
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Does transcript analysis constitute “intervention
or interaction?”
Transcripts often contain “private information”
Are transcripts meaningful if “redacted”
Reliability
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Our own ability to define categories and units
showed that we could establish reliability but
this was dependent on the unit of analysis
As expected, the latent, and especially latent
projective variables are most challenging (but
often the most interesting) to relaibly identify
and code
Validity Problems
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Knowledge telling and knowledge transforming refer to
mental processes by which texts are composed, not to
texts themselves. (Bereiter & Scardemalia, 1987, p. 13).
Linguistic expressions of thought, are indicators of and
not equivalent to thinking
Learning and interaction occur outside of the
transcript.
The personal context is often more pervasive than the
networked educational context.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
Content Analysis
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Quantitative:
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Easiest with manifest variables
Requires rigorous attention to reliability
Can you count the most important educational variables and
do they exist in the transcripts?
Qualitative:
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Faster,
Maybe gets at the “big picture” easier
Low transferability, generalizability and comparison capacity
Different tools –
Same Community of Inquiry?
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“Different mediums serve different social presence
purposes and are heavily indicative of one element. For
instance, in the virtual world, IM has primarily
interactive indicators and blogs have affective
indicators. In order to build a balanced community ….
a variety of technologies should be introduced and
encouraged.” Kemp & Walsh 2006
Can COI model be used to assess preence using social
software, Web 2.0 and tools of the educational
semantic web (Anderson and Whitelaw, 2004)
Equivalency
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Are live teachers critical to teaching presence?
Anderson, T. (2003) Getting the Mix Right. IRRODL
COI meets Web 2.0
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How much does social presence increase in
synchronous activities
Does adding voice (auidoconferencing) graphics (web
conferencing), pictures (video), virtual environment
(immersion) significantly increase social presence?
When does too much social presence detract from
cognitive presence?
Are the resulting limitations on access worth social and
pedagogical gains?
Web 2.0 Social Presence
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Cohesive
MySpace 70 million users, SecondLife 2.7 mil
 New lingo, new patterns of interaction
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Interactive
Records levels of text, audio and video one to one and
one to many via Blogs, Wikis and UTube
 Presence moves beyond the class
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Affective
Multimedia allows body language and voice intonation
thereby affording greater degrees of affective
communications
 Real time is social time
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Web 2.0 Cognitive Presence
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Triggering
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Exploration:
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Search, Google Earth, data bases
Need not be confined to within the community
Multiple culture, contexts
Integration
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Vast increase in content and context for triggering
experiences
Realtime data, videocams, podcasts, sophisticated analysis
Powerful and collaborative modeling, mapping, presentation
and diagram tools
Resolution
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Workplace/home and third places becoming net enabled
As more activity becomes net enabled, we should be able to
see “real application” resolution increase
Web 2.0 Teaching Presence
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Direct Instruction:
 Power of voice and body language through audio, video and
immersive
 Many more resources for referral, scaffolding and reference
 Adaptive tutorials
 Use of autonomous agents
 Virtual communities of practice
Instructional design –
 Learning objects
 IMS Learning Design - an Educational Markup Language
 Validated patterns (see Rohse and Anderson, 2006)
Facilitating Discourse
 Immersive environments
 Agents to track, summarize, record
 Decision making tools
 RSS, syndication, filtering, selective retrieval
COI Beyond the Threaded Discussion
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Blogging has distinct advantages over more
common threaded discussion in its support of
style, ownership and identity and its public
nature may enhance resolution phases of
cognitive presence.
Lack of safety may inhibit social presence
Blogs are a challenging media for expressing
teaching presence
Cameron and Anderson, 2006 Comparing Weblogs to Threaded
Discussion Tools in Online Educational Contexts
http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Nov_06/article01.htm
Teaching Presence
in a Life Long Learning Era
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Learners of today “used to work for someone
else, but will increasingly work for themselves
and instead of serving as functionaries in the
achievement of purposes set by others, they will
increasingly set purposes for themselves”
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Richard Sampson, 2005
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The COI model grew from traditional
institutional focused education – does it speak to
net enhanced life long learning?
Net living requires teachers to help students:
Discover new solutions and new problems
 Increase their social capital
 Focus multiple perspectives and information to
create new knowledge
 Make worthwhile things happen
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Conclusions:
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Theoretical Models like COI can be useful:
Descriptive power: – making sense, accurately
depicting
 Rhetorical power: help us reflect and talk about
our experience
 Inferential power: help us to evolve and test
educational innovations and interventions
 Applicatory power: Helps us design interventions
with greatest likelihood of working in real contexts
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C
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Halverson, C.A. (2002). Activity theory and distributed cognition: Or
what does CSCW need to DO with theories? Computer Supported
Cooperative Work 11: 243–267.
Advice for Practice from
COI Model
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Garrison (2006) extracted principles in bit of a ‘how to’
paper
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Establish a climate that will create a community of inquiry.
Establish critical reflection and discourse that will support
systematic inquiry.
Sustain community through expression of group cohesion.
Encourage and support the progression of inquiry through to
resolution.
Evolve collaborative relationships where students are
supported in assuming increasing responsibility for their
learning.
Ensure that there is resolution and metacognitive
development.
Journal Asynch Learning Networks 2006 10(1)
Conclusions
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Need to triangulate
quantitative transcript
analysis with other
techniques
Conclusions
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The COI model can and must grow to meet the
emerging Net 2.0 context
The Media is the Message
Comments? Questions?
When’s lunch?
May I go to the restroom?
Gee whiz, when does the
REAL FUN start?
Terry Anderson,
[email protected]
Slides at:
cider.athabascau.ca/Members/terrya/presentations

By three methods we may learn wisdom:
First, by reflection, which is noblest;
 Second, by imitation, which is easiest;
 Third by experience, which is the bitterest.
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Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Pattern for a ‘Discussion Group’
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Discussion groups are the most common way of organising activity in
networked learning environments. The degree to which a discussion is
structured, and the choice of structure, are key in determining how
successfully the discussion will promote learning for the participants.
Therefore:
Start any online discussion by establishing its structure. Make the rules
and timetable for this structure explicit to all the members of the
group. Where there is little time available to the group for the
discussion, and/or the members of the group are inexperienced at
holding online discussions, the teacher/facilitator should set the
structure. Where the students are to set their own structure, the
teacher/facilitator should give them support and ideas about how to do
this, and encourage them to do so in a fair and timely way.

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Towards a Pattern Language for Networked Learning - Peter Goodyear et al
(2004)