Abstract:

Online instructional design has improved, especially during the pandemic, when colleges and universities focused on providing multiple resources to faculty as they pivoted to an all-online mode of instruction. As a result, faculty concentrated on content, chunking for salience, and evaluation of learning. Although necessary, successful courses, resulting in higher student satisfaction rates, focused on and provided a sense of presence. This paper will outline how the redesign of M101, Introduction to Health Records, was created using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) as a framework. The COI framework includes cognitive, social, and teaching presence, contributing significantly to student satisfaction. The original course design had a significant history of low student satisfaction rates no matter who was assigned to teach the course; thus, a designer of instruction was needed to create a new course that focused on providing a Community of Inquiry to facilitate learning outcomes mastery and improve student-perceived satisfaction. The strategies to create a COI, based on evidence-based practice, will be articulated with examples. Course design features will be highlighted with Canvas illustrations. The instructional design is not course or content-specific, and all strategies can and should be used for online courses.

Keywords:

Online instructional strategies, cognitive presence, social presence, teacher presence.