Cognitive presence is based on the iterative relationship between personal understanding and shared dialogue. The quality of cognitive presence reflects the quality and quantity of critical thinking, collaborative problem-solving, and construction of meaning occurring in student to student and student to faculty interactions.
Facilitating Cognitive Presence in Your Course
- Articulate Clear Learning Outcomes: Student learning outcomes (SLO’s) are a critical component of all educational courses but are even more essential for FurmanFlex and online courses where students may engage in the course through different modalities to ensure that consistent goals are achieved by all. A learning outcome defines what the student will be able to do or know at the end of the lesson, unit, or course. Well-written learning outcomes should be student-centered, measurable, and clear (McArthur, 2018 B). Clear learning outcomes are important because they a) guide the content materials and the teaching methods, regardless of learning modality, b) can be used to make sure you reach your goals and assess progress, c) ensure students will understand your expectations and the purpose of course activities, even if these differ by learning modality, and d) ensure assessment and grading is guided by clear objectives and targets.
- Encourage interaction: Classroom interactions happen by proximity in the brick-and-mortar classroom, but when some students join your course virtually or some activities occur online, you have to be more deliberate about student-student and student-faculty exchanges. For class sessions you can use synchronous interaction, communal discussion boards, group projects, student presentations, wikis, and peer review groups. “Out” of the classroom, you can help create study groups, develop platforms for collaborative work (e.g. Teams or Padlet) and establish crowd-sourced notes. When done successfully, these interactions create not only a community of learners but can also become lasting friendships (Wehler, 2018). Our colleagues at Equity Unbound have outlined a number of community-building activities for online spaces that encourage interaction.
- Create Communication Channels and Expectations: Spur-of-the-moment connections and interactions are common in the brick-and-mortar classroom but facilitating interaction among students in various modalities of learning, including online, takes structure and clear communication. Develop multiple channels for students to engage with material, interact with each other, and share information. It is also important that you put everything in writing, including instructions for your course activities, information about how to access and utilize course content, how student work will be evaluated, and how course participation will be assessed.
- Structure Opportunities for Inquiry: Based on the four inquiry process phases outlined by Garrison & Vaughan (2008), creating cognitive presence in your course should involve developing opportunities for students to move through the learning process by experiencing:
Triggering event — the problem, challenge, or task. Students are asked to encounter information that presents an idea, problem, or context.
Exploration — the process of both individual reflection and discourse with others leading to divergent ideas, exchange of information, brainstorming, and requests for feedback.
Integration — the process by which members of the community reflect individually and as a group to reach convergence or process areas of divergence by connecting ideas, identifying relationships and patterns, and proposing solutions.
Resolution — the individual or group applies and tests ideas in an applied real world scenario. Learners defend their ideas and the thinking that supports them (Ecoaching, 2020).
Virtual Platforms to Facilitate Inquiry
One of the more common methods of facilitating inquiry to build cognitive presence in hybrid flexible courses is by designing virtual platforms to encourage exploration, interaction, and discussion. Platforms like discussion boards might be used for students to analyze or critique information, reflect on concepts or debate theories, or share opinions or express ideas. Moodle offers several different types of discussion boards:
- A single simple discussion – A single topic discussion developed on one page, which is useful for short focused discussions (cannot be used with separate groups).
- Standard forum for general use – An open forum where anyone can start a new topic at any time; this is the best general-purpose forum.
- Each person posts one discussion – Each person can post exactly one new discussion topic (everyone can reply to them though); this is useful when you want each student to start a discussion about, say, their reflections on the week’s topic, and everyone else responds to these.
- Q and A Forum – Instead of initiating discussions participants pose a question in the initial post of a discussion. Students may reply with an answer, but they will not see the replies of other students to the question in that discussion until they have themselves replied to the same discussion.
- Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format.
As you develop platforms for online interaction, consider the following:
- Some students may lack motivation to participate in an online discussion, for example. Ask yourself how you encourage students to participate in your course when they are more reticent to contribute to in-class verbal discussions? Do you give them other options? Coach them independently? Utilize small-group strategies to encourage those who are reticent to speak? Each of those strategies can be utilized in online platforms.
- Not all online interaction needs to look the same. In what ways do you vary your traditional assignments so that students have space both for polished and well-reasoned arguments and free-form thinking? Are there tools in Moodle (assignment vs. journal features, for example) that might serve these disparate functions?
- Just as in-person discussions often benefit from student facilitators, so can online interactions. What leadership roles do you assign to students in your in-person discussions? Perhaps one of those roles is someone who ensures the conversation stays “on-task”? Consider whether this would be of value in an online space.
- Consider how you might “level-up” interactions online. You could establish a sequence of interactive steps within one activity sequence that first is conducted independently or in small groups with a next step that involves interacting with other individuals/groups by the time the sequence of tasks is complete. This is similar to the jigsaw class activity.
- It is helpful to establish positive norms for collaborative online interactions. The Continuing Courageous Conversations toolkit includes detailed suggestions for this practice and this resource provides an example of how one might establish norms around participation and contributions.
- There are several robust examples of discussion board rubrics here and here that might help you evaluate contributions to these collaborative virtual spaces.
Evaluating Attendance and Participation Online
Because FurmanFlex and online courses are likely to involve students who join through an exclusively virtual pathway and may involve course activities that all students complete online, it is worthwhile to consider how attendance and participation might be assessed for virtual activities. In general, when instructing an online course, faculty tend to utilize some combination of the following dimensions of “attendance”:
- Records of how often a student logs in and accesses specific portions of the LMS
- Records of activity completion – Moodle allows you to set up minimum “activity completion” standards for each activity (forum posting, assignment submission, reading, etc.) that a student has to meet before that activity is marked complete for that student.
- Records of participation in any required synchronous activities (lectures, group chats, one-on-one meetings)
Of course, attendance is not the same as participation, which is often where a rubric comes in handy to provide clear information to the students about how their level of engagement will be assessed. Consider how you might distinguish between these two aspects in an online space. For example, if a portion of your online engagement involves forum discussion posts, you’d want to develop a pretty clear policy of sorts for how participation is assessed in forums. For example, “in order to be receive full credit for each forum post, you not only need to log in to view the post, but contribute in a way that aligns with our forum rubric posted in Moodle.” In that way, you have to do more than just spectate and log in (attend) to “participate”. It is up to you how often you assess that participation (e.g. for every forum, once a week, twice a semester).
The Furman attendance policies (can’t miss more than 15%, 25%) still apply for online and flexible courses if you have no other attendance policies in place. If you plan to include online activities in your attendance or participation assessment, it might be worth creating some mile-markers for your students that are fairly explicit. If online forums participation is required, for example, you’d want to make it clear that in order not to miss more than 15%, you can’t miss more than say 3 postings out of 20, etc. to maintain attendance standards.