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AbstractOnline courses can feel isolating and sometimes lack human connections that can motivate students. We developed a fully online geoscience course to build a ‘Community of Inquiry’ with attention to cognitive, social, and teaching presences. We ran the course using nearly identical materials for 8 semesters (recorded video lectures, labs, assignments, and assessments). Slight variations in instructor behavior caused profound impacts on student performance, creating a natural experiment to isolate factors that influence student performance. During semesters that instructors sent fewer course announcements and provided less feedback to students, about 50% more students earned D’s and F’s than semesters with frequent interactions. These performance drops correlated with drops in key indicators of social presence such as the number of students who thought the instructor knew their name. We developed an instrument to quantify student perceptions about the strength of student-student and instructor-student connections. An exploratory principal component analysis revealed two underlying constructs that we interpret as social presence and cognitive presence. We found that students with the highest reported social and cognitive presences had overall course grades an average of 12 points higher (out of 100) than those with the lowest presences, when all other factors were equal. Social and cognitive presence had relatively equal effects, but each explained more than 3 times the variance in student performance than the amount of time students reported spending on the course. When instructors build a supportive community with online students and facilitate their interaction around course ideas, student performance benefits.

AbstractPromoting collaboration and discourse in asynchronous online courses is challenging; students need something engaging to talk about, a communications medium in which to fluidly discuss it, and a social environment that supports discourse. We designed a fully online introductory geoscience lecture and lab course called Geology Goes Hollywood that emphasizes all three of the dimensions of the community of inquiry framework: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. To heighten cognitive presence, we pair Hollywood movies with documentaries about issues relevant to students’ lives (specifically earthquake hazards, water supply and contamination, and issues of fracking). To promote social presence, students worked in teams to evaluate one another’s conceptual understanding of the course material, collaboratively analyze data and interpret findings, and discuss real-world scenarios. Our teaching presence involved appropriate collaborative technologies that enabled human interactions and consistent deadlines. Because of the effort to build community, about a third of students reported that our asynchronous online class felt “more human” than many of their face-to-face general education courses.