The infographic above illustrates key strategies to support the Community of Inquiry for Leadership Development in a virtual training environment. The strategies I’ve chosen support an environment where our operational leaders, who are geographically spread across all of British Columbia, have voiced their challenges and concerns with attending classroom training due to budget cuts, limited availability for travel to and from headquarters, ineffectiveness and ongoing capacity issues and time constraints. Majority of our operational leaders in supervisor roles, spend time on the ground and on site with their crew managing and supporting day to day tasks.
As we shift into a new learning space leaders have suggested supportiveness, receptiveness, excitement and acceptance of training through virtual training platforms delivered both synchronously and asynchronously.
As the primary instructional designer and facilitator, I’ve listed some strategies, however will leverage many more not mentioned. I felt the ones on the infographic best support the leaders to be successful and will in the greatest outcomes in participation, engagement, trust, collaboration, meaningful and deeper learning. In the Community of Inquiry if successfully integrated and facilitated with the interplay of social, teaching and cognitive presence can result and emerge the higher-order learning with purposeful and critical discourse (Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes, & Garrison, 2013).
Social presence where participants identify with the community, build and foster a trusting and safe learning environment, as well as share perspectives, stories and experiences will result in greater group cohesion (Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes, & Garrison, 2013). Through a few strategies suggested such as acclimation to the learning environment, personalized introductions and activities promoting increased discussions and sharing will create learner motivation and engagement.
Teaching presence with its 3 elements of design, facilitation and instruction will support the necessity of the foreign learning environment many leaders voice concerns about and their aptitude level. Through well-constructed learning environments, enriched discussions through effective questioning techniques, appropriate learning activities and leadership around content accuracy and expectations, it will support the social and cognitive presence desired (Anderson, 2018).
Cognitive presence is when learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through ongoing reflection and discourse. Through strategies such as modelling and encouraging divergent thinking, reflective and critical questioning, as well as encouraging debates and the dialogue around the possibilities of more than one solution will deepen and enrich learning (Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes, & Garrison, 2013).
References
Anderson, T. (2018). How Communities of Inquiry Drive Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age. Contact North.
Vaughan, N.D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D.R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Athabasca University Press. Chapter 3: Facilitation (pp. 45-61).