You just looked at the principles of backward design and how they can provide a useful model for designing courses, for both online and face-to-face settings.

In the next activity, you will reflect on the importance of alignment between learning outcomes and the assessment tasks, but also on what is called the three presences in the Community of inquiry (CoI).

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements: social, cognitive and teaching presence. (Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 2000).

In online teaching and in the parts of your blended teaching online, it may not always be clear to students what is expected of them since the familiar cues from meeting teachers online disappear. The three related concepts of the CoI provides a way of thinking about what you already do to help make implicit strategies explicit so that you can carry them over online.

In a recent article in The Campus, Making the implicit explicit: improve online learning through ‘presence’: Dara Cassidy gives examples of how you can work with these core concepts. The video from Centre for Teaching and Learning, Western University starts with aligning outcomes and then moves on to a description of the three presences in the CoI: cognitive presence, teacher presence, and social presence.

Jenny: this paragraph is unclear and the link does not work... which video are you talking about? You should embed it here since the reflection below points to it.

You will come back to this model later when discussing how to plan for activating students and planning for teacher presence.

Watch and reflection

To do: Watch the video from Beth. It will provide you with some questions you need to ask yourself to design your course in Canvas to incorporate Cognitive presence, teacher presence and social presence (5.00 min). You will be asked to make notes in the text box under the video. Click on Take this survey to access the video and the questions.