Developing a Community of Inquiry in a Face-to-Face Class: How an Online Learning Framework Can Enrich Traditional Classroom Practice

Traditional classes are typically bound both in the classroom space and scheduled time. In this article, I show how applying an online learning framework called the Community of Inquiry and an organizational architecture of matrixed teams has worked in a face-to-face capstone class and extended those boundaries. These were introduced as an alternative to a case-based writing course as a means of getting more engagement, better thinking, and better papers from students. Matrixed teams involve assigning students to both a semester long team organized around a complex and detailed group paper and, at the same time, to a topic analysis team that fed the content for the paper. In order to support this inquiry, I also used a social media platform called Yammer to cultivate conversations outside the normal class hours that capitalized on in-class work. The approach has been effective: Participation is both deeper in topics and includes more people than in traditional classes. Furthermore, the quality of the written work is significantly better in structure and content, particularly with students at the lower end of the classes.