The multimodal community of inquiry: a framework for evaluating online learning environments in higher education

This chapter introduces Multimodal Community of Inquiry – a mixed-method approach for examining the use of non-linguistic semiotic resources in online learning environments and students' perceptions of their effectiveness. The approach is a novel association of two frameworks. The first is the Community of Inquiry framework, which was first developed by and is widely used to measure students' perceptions of three types of presence (teaching, social, and cognitive) that promote critical inquiry skills in effective online teaching and learning. The second is multimodal social semiotics, which includes a model for studying software as a “semiotic technology”, and invites us to examine learning management systems (LMSs) in terms of their built-in semiotic resources (e.g., selections of font types, layout templates, and options for inserting or recording sound or video) and rules about co-deploying such resources in online learning environments. To illustrate the value of this approach for extending our currently limited knowledge of multimodality in online teaching and learning, we present key findings from the analysis of the online learning environments of two Master of Applied Linguistics/Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher education courses – one from Korea created with the LMS Google Classroom and one from Australia created with Moodle. These findings reveal that the multimodal design of each environment reflects the affordances of its LMS platform and the instructor's beliefs and values regarding TESOL pedagogy and university teaching.