2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

and to their own interests and competencies, but
enough to serve as self-contained learning activities,
these learning objects, of appropriate level and
dimension, enable adoption by a large number of
educators. They also often contain assessment
activities to measure learning outcomes. The future
of course development will consist of customizing
internationalized sets of educational resources to
best meet the distinct localized needs of all students
and teachers. However, without a system of effective
distribution, peer review and revision, instructorconstructed
resources often perish on local servers.
Repositories for educational resources are being
created to surmount this challenge, so that the
creation and distribution of such is a major factor in
increasing the rate by which internet-based
education is produced and delivered.
A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The significance of context and creation of a
community of learners to facilitate reflection and
critical discourse has previously been underscored.
The assembly of knowledge for an individual is
shaped to large extent by the social environment.
Thus an environment of diverse perspectives and
varied choices will encourage critical thinking and
creativity. A community of inquiry is both a requisite
for higher-order thinking skills and a core element in
the e-learning conceptual framework. The
foundational framework is a community of inquiry
with an overlapping of three key elements of
cognitive, social, and teaching experience. These
must be considered when planning and delivering
education to ensure a quality e-learning experience.
Cognitive Presence
Education, at its core, is about learning defined by
process and outcome. Cognitive presence is, “the
extent to which learners are able to construct and
confirm meaning through sustained reflection and
discourse in a critical community of inquiry”
(Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001). It means
facilitating the analysis, construction, and confirmation
of meaning and understanding within a community
of learners through sustained deliberation and
discussion that is largely supported by text-based
communication.
Teaching Presence
The expanded educational opportunities and
choices in an e-learning context have rendered an
onerous responsibility to teaching. Teaching
presence is defined as, “the design, facilitation and
direction of cognitive and social processes for the
purpose of realizing personally meaningful and
educationally worthwhile learning outcomes”
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(Anderson, et al., 2001). It is concerned with shaping
the right transactional balance and, along with the
learners, managing and monitoring the achievement
of worthwhile learning outcomes within an
appropriate timetable. Teaching presence performs
an essential service in identifying relevant societal
knowledge, designing experiences that will facilitate
critical discussion and reflection, and measuring and
evaluating learners’ achievements. With e-learning,
this is both easier and more difficult. It is easier
because the medium supports discus-sion. It is more
difficult because the medium is inherently different
and requires new approaches. While e-learning
demands greater attention to balancing control and
responsibility, the result can be very rewarding.
The role of the teacher in e-learning will change for
the better. Teachers’ responsibilities, in any context,
traditional or e-learning, include design and
organization, facilitating discussion and direct
instruction. While complex and multifaceted, the
liberating frame of e-learning has significantly
altered how these roles are fulfilled.
Social Presence
Social presence is defined as the ability of participants
in a community of inquiry to project themselves
socially and emotionally through the medium
of communication being used (Garrison, Anderson,
& Archer, 2000). The creation of a community
requires social presence and, when it is a
community of inquiry that is formed, social presence
becomes even more specific and demanding.
Because inquiry involves sustained critical
discourse, social presence must be congruent with
inquiry and the achievement of specific learning
outcomes.
Text-based communication, synchronous or
asynchronous, presents a challenge in creating a
social environment and a community of inquiry.
Communication theorists have drawn considerable
attention to the lack of nonverbal communication
cues that are considered crucial in forming
collaborative relationships. The absence of a visual
channel reduces the possibilities for expression of
socio-emotional material and decreases the
information available about another. The question is
whether this is fatal to creating and sustaining a fully
collaborative community of inquiry. The simple
answer to this complex question is that it has not
been shown that students can and do overcome the
lack of nonverbal communication by establishing
familiarity through the use of greetings, encouragement,
paralinguistic emphasis (i.e., capitals,
punctuations, emoticons) and self-disclosure
(Rourke & Anderson, 2004).