Keeping on the topic of books, I am pleased to say that Marti Cleveland-Innes and I have had a book proposal accepted by Routledge. It is titled: An introduction to distance education: Understanding teaching and learning in a new era. This will be an edited book with contributions from the leaders in distance and online learning who are responsible for mapping the direction of these two fields of study and practice. As with most books, it will take some time before we see this in print.
During this academic year I have been working with a visiting doctoral student, Zehra Akyol, who is from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She has been researching two courses offered by Norm Vaughan. The courses were delivered fully online in the fall and then in a blended learning format in the 2008 winter term. This provided an opportunity to do a comparison of the two approaches using the Community of Inquiry to frame the research and help interpret the findings. We have had one paper accepted for publication and are working on a second. The title of the first paper is: The development of a community of inquiry over time in an online course: Understanding the progression and integration of social, cognitive and teaching presence. The second paper will focus on the comparison of online and blended approaches.
Zehra, Norm and I did presentations on these topics at the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE) 2008 International Conference. Zehra did a great job presenting some interesting and complex data (she is second from the right in the picture below). The others are, from the left, Phil Ice, Karen Swan and Peter Shea.
Another important development reported at the CNIE Conference was a presentation on the development, validation and application of the Community of Inquiry Instrument with Phil Ice, Karen Swan, Peter Shea, Marti Cleveland-Innes and myself. The first picture has me at the podium with Phil, Marti, Karen and Peter from left to right. The second picture has us reacting to an obviously very funny comment from Peter.
Finally, Marti Cleveland-Innes, Karen Swan, Phil Ice and I did a CNIE pre-conference workshop titled: Community connections: Implementing three presences in an online community of inquiry. Again, left to right, we have Phil Ice, Karen Swan, myself, and Marti Cleveland-Innes.
Slides of these presentations can be found at: http://communitiesofinquiry.com/presentations
