Designing a Learning Environment for Supporting Community of Inquiry with an Online Academic Conference

Abstract

Several academic conferences have been conducted online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While online academic conferences have provided formal learning spaces, there remains a dearth of informal ones. We hypothesized that graduate students can enhance their learning through informal communication with their peers when attending online academic conferences. Based on Garrison's (2017) Community of Inquiry, we designed an online group-viewing environment for an academic conference and conducted preliminary research. This paper reports the results of additional research with an increased number of participants in an environment that underwent expert review to improve reproducibility and reliability. An analysis of the results of the participant questionnaire showed that online group-viewing enhanced social presence and provided learning opportunities. Nevertheless, improving teaching presence and cognitive presence to deepen their learning to the stage of integration or resolution was necessary—this aligns with the results of the preliminary research.