Creating a 'Community of Inquiry': A Framework for Optimizing the Virtual Education Experience

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Background: Medical educators must learn to implement technologic advances to create meaningful learning experiences, implementing media tools that are effective in meeting evolving academic needs and fostering interpersonal engagement. The increasing time constraints in a department of more than 1,600 faculty interspersed throughout a large metropolitan complex served as the catalyst for utilizing technology to create a framework for providing virtual faculty development. Objective: To use a Community of Inquiry (CoI) as a framework to guide the development of an interactive, virtual writing retreat. Methods: We used the three elements of CoI--social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence--to transform the curriculum and delivery method of an existing writing workshop into an interactive virtual experience. To enhance virtual teaching and learning, we created a positive climate allowing learners to project themselves into the community through discourse (social), leveraged technologies to enable construction of knowledge by individual learners (cognitive), and revamped the existing curriculum for optimal virtual learning outcomes (teaching). We evaluated its educational effectiveness via surveys based on the CoI framework. Results: The highly interactive, four-hour, virtual writing retreat was well received and serves as a model for implementing the CoI framework in other disciplines. Forty multidisciplinary faculty attended the retreat; 90% completed the entire session. In the post-session survey (50% response rate), participants rated the learning activities highly. Conclusion: Our conceptual model and practical recommendations are offered to other medical educators and faculty developers for designing a tailored CoI with effective virtual synchronous learning.