Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to Understand Students’ Learning Experience in Online Undergraduate Business Courses

This paper presents the results of a study that explored undergraduate students’ perceptions of cognitive, social, and teaching presences in online business courses and their relationship to students’ course satisfaction in addition to demographic variables. Student engagement has proven to be one of the main reasons for student retention and satisfaction in online courses and the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer promised to provide clear structure to identify student engagement. A total of 223 business undergraduate students participated in the online survey adapted from the CoI survey (Garrison et al., The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2–3), 87–105, 2000) with additional demographic variables. Results indicated that teaching presence and cognitive presence of the CoI framework has a significant impact on the course rate of online undergraduate business courses confirmed by the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). A moderation effect of gender on the relationship between age and course rate was also found.