Community of Inquiry in Adult Online Learning

The adult education literature emphasizes community building in order to increase effectiveness and success of online teaching and learning. In this chapter the Community of Inquiry Framework that was developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) has been introduced as a promising theory for adult learning in online environments. The chapter discusses the potential of the CoI framework to create effective adult online learning communities by utilizing the research findings from an online course. Overall, the research findings showed that students had positive attitudes toward the community developed in the course and that their perception of constituting elements of the community of inquiry was significantly related to perceived learning and satisfaction.