Coi the Community of Inquiry

COI

The Community of Inquiry (COI)approach used at Frontier is a useful and practical way of understanding my personal role as a student at the institution. This approach and its way of dividing its important attributes into three distinct groups somehow rings true with me and my own personal approach. The purpose of this essay is to personally reflect on my recent participation in Frontier Bound and its immediate impact on my educational attitudes. In this essay I will explore how this experience made me reexamine some of my previous feelings towards learning.

Sometimes when important information is revealed to you, a strange reaction might ensue. Learning about Frontier's adoption of COI as a means to education helped me see things in a new light. COI basically divides the educational system into three different aspects: cognitive presence, teaching presence and social presence. This simple organization of these terms is a very practical tool to help me file my experiences and be able to recall them to use them.

It is comforting to realize that the leadership at Frontier has adopted a method that appears to treat education as a total and holistic experience. Incorporating social factors is extremely important for health care professionals. Understanding that the people that we are trying to help are all different and come from different backgrounds and incorporating comfortable climates and discourse for those who we serve not only makes the experience more successful but also more pleasant and rewarding.

My approach can now be summarized and classified into one of the COI's subdivision categories which definitely helps me simplify my academic approach. Having an anchor point that corresponds to Frontier's philosophy essentially gives me a new way of communicating any topic to anyone who can understand the basic tenets of both COI and Frontier. It is essentially like speaking a different language that is specific to our line of thought.