Community of Inquiry and Online Learning Engagement

As listed above, teaching presence in the CoI framework is one of the most influential components that influence the engagement between teachers and students. To make teaching presence effective and acceptable to students under the CoI framework, it is important to determine the teacher’s role in such an environment. In an inquiry-based learning environment, a teacher’s role is determined by two different distinctions: the amount of teacher direction and the type of teacher regulation (Dobber et al, 2017).

The amount of teacher direction decides the authority a teacher has in controlling how students learn throughout the learning process. Depending on the specific learning goals, the instructional direction will normally transition between three modalities (Furtak et al., 2012): teacher-centered (teacher decides the question and methods to be inquired by students), student-centered (student decides what they want to study, investigate, and the evaluation), or the hybrid of both (negotiated between teachers and students based on an established investigation model). The type of teacher regulation, on the other hand, decides different approaches a teacher would use to reach the learning goal (Frutak et al., 2012) that relates to meta-cognitive regulation (planning, monitoring, and evaluation), social regulation (guiding social presence for cooperative problem-solving), and conceptual regulation (knowledge and rules). These regulations are independent aspects of regulations, yet they intertwine in the real-life application when the CoI framework is presented in the instructional design.

Once the modalities and teacher’s role in the classroom are determined, the course should include specific designs to allow the teacher’s presence and roles to be effective. In recent research using the CoI framework in a blended learning environment of EFL with 97 Chinese university students, Liu and Deris (2022) found that students regarded the teacher’s guidance throughout the course as useful for them to achieve learning goals, therefore they preferred teacher-student interactions (grading, teacher’s feedback, teacher-guided discussion, etc.) that has more teacher-centered approach (i.e. teacher as “advisor” rather than “facilitator”). This result came from a more teacher-centered approach that established a distinction between teacher and students in the course design, including specific practices such as “modeling and expressing expectations”, “assigning different roles in group discussion activities”, and “summarizing the student discussion or guiding students to summarize the discussion to form a holistic understanding”, etc. In a more seminar-styled online course with a student-centered modality, students showed an increased cognitive presence and social presence because they had opportunities to share their questions, have deeper discussions with their peers, and choose to answer questions that were not generated by the teacher (Li, 2022). To maximize student’s involvement in the online classroom, it is the teacher’s responsibility to decide which kind of approach should be used to increase student engagement and learning effectiveness.

There are many kinds of collaborative or interactive activities in a synchronous online learning environment, but a breakout room is one of the frequently used strategies for incorporating collaborative activities in a synchronous online learning environment (Clark, p. 402). Adding a breakout room into the synchronous learning experience is merely a medium for providing dedicated space for collaboration. Still, it is a dedicated time slot within a course that teachers need to think about how to maximize students’ collaborative learning in the instructional design. As Halverson and Graham pointed out (2019), learners would bring their experiences and characteristics together in a learning environment with online components, and their engagement would be focused on how well their cognitive energy and emotional energy would be prompted throughout their learning experience. To maximize the breakout room as a place for social presence and engagement, instructors should develop their breakout rooms to encourage student-centered engagement. For collaborative online learning, three major aspects should be considered (Redmond & Lock, 2003):

1. Fostering social presence. The feeling of social presence causes the learner to engage in deeper cognitive processing during learning that would lead to a better learning experience, or the learner will feel disengaged as they do not recognize that they are learning with other people (Clark, 2016). Maximizing the social presence of teachers and students would cognitively help students to continue their focus on achieving the learning goals of the breakout rooms and the lesson, increasing the quality of learning outcomes. It enables the cultivation of trust and a safe space for student’s free exploration, expression, and collaboration (Redmond & Lock,2003); 

2. Creating and sustaining a learning community. Within a collaborative environment, all participants should think of themselves as active participants to increase their connection, contribute to the maintenance of such a community, and become responsible and respectful of others. 

3. Developing and maintaining teaching presence. Not only do students need their presence, but teachers should also plan, organize, and monitor the disclosure of online courses. Elements of the instructional design should reflect the teacher’s expertise in developing relevant learning content for students to achieve learning goals, moving beyond the basic interaction and cooperative learning to the collaborative knowledge-building process, and understanding the change within students before and after the activities. 

Instead of three individual aspects, Redmond & Lock (2003) regarded this model as a Vinn-chart model with the interloping of the three, thus creating more aspects that allow the learning to become a more actionable element for online collaborative learning. When this model fuses into synchronous online learning, the organic combination of online learning engagement and collaborative tasks can improve students’ learning outcomes and experience profoundly. Research has proven that both instructors and students believe in small groups’ importance and benefit in learning (Rezaei, 2018), and it will be more effective when group members know each other smaller groups of students would equally benefit from their collaborative learning in online learning (Akcaoglu & Lee, 2016; Rezaei, 2018). This is the primary reason I would choose a breakout room as the medium for most collaborative learning in synchronous online learning environments. The smaller size allows participants to build closer relationships and connections with each other, and they would learn from each other as they slowly understand how they are more likely to learn, collaborate, and play a role in their social learning experiences. 

Different teachers and instructors may have different approaches to how a breakout room session will precede in a synchronous classroom, and a more tested design of breakout rooms is either verbal discussion between the students or problem-driven tasks to complete. However, when thinking about the breakout room as a medium for allowing collaborative work and social learning between students, there should be various differentiated activities that would help students stay engaged with their learning tasks or develop student-centered learning opportunities (Brindly et al., 2009). For example, in Clark’s book about constructing an e-learning experience, the authors brought up the peer teaching concept that “asks learners to prepare and present relevant course topics to their peers (p. 249, 2016)”. In their experiment, the group of students that received an assignment of preparing a teaching presentation and teaching to the whole class developed a way better understanding of their learned materials. Haugland et al.’s research (2022) about collaborative learning in a small group setting, shows that small groups with joint responsibility and flexible organization will promote a better learning outcome, collaboration, and discussion. 

To make breakout rooms with interactive activities more successful and effective, Brindly et al. (2009) proposed several suggestions about instructional designs that would maximize small group learning in the online environment: 1) establish a healthy balance between instruction and learner autonomy; 2) nurture the establishment of learner relationships and sense of community; 3) make the group task relevant for the learner; and 4) choose tasks that are best performed by a group. To turn those suggestions into the implication, for example, the breakout rooms should not be limited to a place for knowing your classmates or verbal discussion, but they can become a preparation space for a variety of collaborative activities or challenges they will face with the larger group. The collaborative activities can be similar to the peer teacher as Clark (2016), but it can also be debate preparations representing conflicting schools of ideas, role-playing different groups of stakeholders at universities to figure out a balanced budget for the next fiscal year, or team-based composition of constructing a functional web-based app prototype for a specific purpose.