With the increasing pace of technological changes in the modern society, there has been a growing interest from educators, business leaders, and policymakers in teaching important higher-order skills which were identified as necessary for thriving in the present-day globalized economy. In this regard, one of the most widely discussed higher order skills is critical thinking, whose importance in shaping problem solving, decision making, and logical thinking has been recognized. Within the domain of distance and online education, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model provides a pedagogical framework for understanding the critical dimensions of student learning and factors which impact the development of student critical thinking. The CoI model follows the social-constructivist perspective on learning in which learning is seen as happening in both individual minds of learners and through the discourse within the group of learners. Central to the CoI model is the construct of cognitive presence, which captures the student cognitive engagement and the development of critical thinking and deep thinking skills. However, the assessment of cognitive presence is challenging task, particularly given its latent nature and the inherent physical and time separation between students and instructors in distance education settings. One way to address this problem is to make use of the vast amounts of learning data being collected by learning systems. This thesis presents novel methods for understanding and assessing the levels of cognitive presence based on learning analytics techniques and the data collected by learning environments. We first outline a comprehensive model for cognitive presence assessment which builds on the well-established evidence-cantered design (ECD) assessment framework. The proposed assessment model provides a foundation of the thesis, showing how the developed analytical models and their components fit together and how they can be adjusted for new learning contexts. The thesis shows two distinct and complementary analytical methods for assessing students’ cognitive presence and its development. The first method is based on the automated classification of student discussion messages and captures learning as it is observed in the student dialogue. The second analytics method relies on the analysis of log data of students’ use of the learning platform and captures the individual dimension of the learning process. The developed analytics also extend current theoretical understanding of the cognitive presence construct through data-informed operationalization of cognitive presence with different quantitative measures extracted from the student use of online discussions. We also examine methodological challenges of assessing cognitive presence and other forms of cognitive engagement through the analysis of trace data. Finally, with the intent of enabling for the wider adoption of the CoI model for new online learning modalities, the last two chapters examine the use of developed analytics within the context of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Given the substantial differences between traditional online and MOOC contexts, we first evaluate the suitability of the CoI model for MOOC settings and then assess students’ cognitive presence using the data collected by the MOOC platform. We conclude the thesis with the discussion of practical application and impact of the present work and the directions for the future research.

The purpose of this study was to explore how instructors of online courses accommodate and make provisions for culturally diverse learners in an online community of inquiry. Ten instructors from two Alberta higher education institutions participated in two phases of research. To explore this phenomenon in the CoI model, intercultural competency indicators were created to test how they could develop and expand teaching and social presence in a cross-cultural environment. In the first phase, analysis of the open-ended survey questionnaire (AMEQ) revealed that in the absence of any cross-cultural design, instructors use facilitation and open communication strategies to foster learning and prevent conflict. The second phase, informed by the first phase, involved augmenting the original 34-item CoI survey instrument. Additional roles that relate to instructor cross-cultural efficacy were incorporated into both teaching presence and social presence elements in the CoI survey instrument. The revised 37-item CoI survey instrument was then administered to the same respondents for face validity. Findings revealed that the incorporated cultural indicators correlated highly with the teaching and social indicators, indicating their usefulness to measure multicultural efficacy in the CoI model. / 2012-April