Online Community of Inquiry Syllabus Rubric

As more traditional college courses transition to online formats, educators need effective teaching practices for delivering content and building discourse to create an online community of inquiry (COI). A COI includes the social and cognitive interactions among students, instructors, and experts in the field, as well as the interaction with the content provided. Social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence are essential elements of the communication loop for an online COI (Garrison, 2000).

Dr. Van Haneghan and I (2016) developed a rubric to evaluate syllabi for the potential of engendering a COI through planned online activities.  It’s based on general concepts from Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s (2000) Community of Inquiry framework, Roblyer’s (2004) Rubric for Assessing Interactive Qualities in Distance Courses©, California State University-Chico’s (2009) Rubric for Online Instruction, Johnson’s (2007) Ecological Assessment Tool, and the Quality Matters™ Rubric Standards Fifth Edition (2014), as well as significant findings from the literature.

Our rubric consists of the following integral elements for developing an online COI in a college course: instructional design for cognitive presence, educational technology for the COI, COI loop for social presence, support for learner characteristics, and instruction and feedback for teaching presence. It’s a 5-point rubric with the following scales: low, basic, moderate, above average, and exemplary. The points awarded determine the course’s potential level of building an online COI: low, moderate, or high. (See link below.)

The Online Community of Inquiry Syllabus Rubric (Copyright 2015 by Rogers & Van Haneghan) is used to review the planned interaction treatments (ITs), not the actual behaviors that occurred in the courses. Its purpose is to determine the inclusion and strength of ITs in online course syllabi according to the COI triad of presences. Our theoretical underlying premise is the more interactive and cognitively challenging the course, the higher the level of student satisfaction and course achievement.

We used this rubric to evaluate online course syllabi from a College of Education for a research study, and the raters obtained good inter-rater reliability with it. I presented this study at a roundtable at the American Education Research Association in 2019. At my former job, I used it to review online instructors’ syllabi before course design or redesign efforts, as a way to provide specific feedback. It serves as a great instructional design tool for the analysis phase. Dr. Khoury and I (2018) replicated the rubric analysis study across disciplines at a different institution. I presented the findings at the Association of Educational Communications and Technology in 2019.

I co-wrote a chapter for a journal on these case studies: Rogers, S. A., & Khalsa, G. K. (2021). Analysis of online course syllabi for planned interactions and learner support. Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, 40, 125-141. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2055-364120210000040009

References

Cummings, J. A., Bonk, C. J., & Jacobs, F. (2002). Twenty-first century college syllabi: Options for online communication and interactivity. Internet & Higher Education, 5(1), 1.

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education 2(2-3), 87-105.

Johnson, E. S. (2007). Promoting learner-learner interactions through ecological assessments of the online environment. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 3(2). http://jolt.merlot.org/vol3no2/johnson.htm

Roblyer, M., & Wiencke, W. (2004). Exploring the interaction equation: Validating a rubric to assess and encourage interaction in distance courses. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 8(4).

Rogers, S., & Khoury, S. (2018, October). Rubric to evaluate online course syllabi plans for engendering a community of inquiry: Round II. Paper presented at the meeting of the Association of Educational Technology & Communications

Rogers, S., & Van Haneghan, J. (2016). Rubric to evaluate online course syllabi plans for engendering a community of inquiry. Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, 349-357. AACE.

Rubric for Online Instruction. (2009). Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. California State University-Chico. https://www.csuchico.edu/eoi/rubric.shtml

Quality Matters™ Rubric Standards. (2014). Higher education rubric, fifth edition. Quality Matters Program (QM). MarylandOnline, Inc. https://www.qualitymatters.org/rubric

Sandra Annette Rogers, Ph.D.

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