Categories: Communication Design, Theory & Rhetoric
Summary:
Morgan's award-winning article adapted "as a theoretical frame work to understand the why's of teaching presence, revealing a complex negotiation between instructors as subjects and the mediating components of the activity system" (Morgan, 2011, p. 1). The purpose of this approach provided the author the opportunity to assess and reflect on online teaching.
They found that the broad generalizations often given to online instructors from the Communities of Inquiry framework may ignore the situations, subjects, and circumstances of the wide variety of online courses. They conclude with an updated definition of teaching presence (see below).
Citation-Worthy:
"The predominant use of content analysis methods in COI and teaching presence research (c.f. Shea, Vickers, and Hayes, 2010, p. 130, for a summary of teaching presence research examining online discussions) has, for the most part, limited the focus to cataloguing and quantifying interactions, and has not taken a closer look at the contextual conditions in which presence take place. As a result, teaching recommendations are sometimes made that might not apply to diverse contexts. For example, Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) recommend that discussion topics should last a week or two at the most in order to encourage deep reflection, and small groups should be used to provide greater opportunity for dialogue without producing too many message postings (p. 97). While this recommendation is certainly adopted in many online course designs, it is debateable whether or not it suits different kinds of teachers, students, courses, and online teaching and learning contexts" (Morgan, 2011, p. 2).
"The semantic value of a term such as “teaching presence” is that it provides the opportunity to go beyond notions of online teaching as facilitation: “guide on the side” or “sage on the stage”. However, the COI framework, as currently defined, limits the potential for understanding teaching presence as a much broader construct than descriptions of roles or teaching behaviours within an online context. When a sociocultural position is adopted, teaching presence could be defined as “the negotiation of instructor interactions within a mediated context with the object of attending to student learning”. Describing teaching presence as a negotiation within a mediated context requires a broader view of what instructors bring to the online context, how they position themselves and are positioned by others within it, and the components of the activity system that shape this negotiation. While COI research has been challenged to go in new directions (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007) and a healthy debate has begun about its strengths and weaknesses (Rourke and Kanuka, 2009; Akyol et al, 2009; Jézégou, 2010), we are perhaps at a point where looking beyond the field of distance education will offer new approaches to understanding online teaching, and through the tensions of our own disciplinary activity systems, lead to transformations in our understanding" (Morgan, 2011, p. 9).
