Learning from decades of online distance education: MOOCs and the Community of Inquiry framework

Despite their growing popularity, there are many contradictory arguments between supporters and detractors of MOOCs. Nevertheless, the advent of mass-scale online courses is increasingly credited to have the potential to reshape higher education significantly over time, and recent research analyses how and in which ways such a potential can be leveraged. Aim of this conceptual study is to incorporate the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework into learning design practice to overcome current MOOCs pedagogical limitations. In order to be applied to a large numbers of participants, the three presences of the CoI framework (social, cognitive and metacognitive, and teaching) need to be adjusted and combined with the distributed learning approach. In this way, fostering distributed learning among participants would lead learners to take responsibility for their learning experience through the exploitation of roles and tasks traditionally assigned to distinct and separate roles. These adjustments could address issues of participation, motivation, and enhance successful learning experience.