ENA connected social presence with stages of cognitive presence in online discussions

Rolim and colleagues use Epistemic Network Analysis to investigate a central claim in the Community of Inquiry framework: social presence and cognitive presence are related, but their relationship is not captured well by treating each indicator as an isolated frequency. Their 2019 article in The Internet and Higher Education models the connections among coded indicators in asynchronous online discussions.

The study used six offerings, from 2008 to 2011, of a fully online, research-intensive master's course in software engineering at a Canadian public university. Eighty-one students produced 1,747 Moodle discussion messages. The transcripts were coded for social-presence indicators and the four cognitive-presence phases: triggering event, exploration, integration, and resolution. The corpus also supported a comparison between a control group of 37 students with 845 messages and a scaffolded group of 44 students with 902 messages.

ENA was applied at the student level for three purposes. First, it modeled connections between social and cognitive presence. Second, it compared instructional roles and the scaffolded and control conditions. Third, it examined how the connections changed across the weeks of a course. This relational design let the authors inspect whether particular forms of social interaction tended to appear in the same local contexts as particular phases of inquiry.

The networks showed that affective social-presence indicators were more strongly associated with the higher cognitive-presence phases of integration and resolution. Interactive indicators were connected more closely with the earlier phases of triggering events and exploration. Students in the scaffolded condition were positioned closer to higher levels of cognitive presence than students in the control condition. The longitudinal networks also made it possible to see how the composition of relationships changed as course activity unfolded.

These results should not be reduced to a claim that social presence automatically produces deeper learning. The evidence comes from coded discourse in one graduate course design, and the network relationships depend on the Community of Inquiry coding scheme, the definition of local context, and the instructional conditions. The comparison is useful because it shows how an intervention corresponded with different relational patterns, but the network alone does not isolate a causal mechanism or establish learning beyond the discussion data. The contribution is a method for asking more precise questions about how social and cognitive processes co-occur over time, with visual and statistical comparisons that can be returned to the original messages for interpretation.