Providing Teaching Presence in cMOOCs with Minimal Facilitation

Determine effective approaches for providing teaching presence in connectivist Massive Open Online Courses (cMOOCs) that intentionally maintain minimal formal facilitation, specifying designs or mechanisms that can operationalize teaching presence under these constraints.

Background

Within the Community of Inquiry framework, teaching presence is a key lever for enhancing social and cognitive presence in online learning. Prior research has shown that strengthening teaching presence supports better discourse and learning outcomes.

However, cMOOCs intentionally minimize formal facilitation to preserve learner autonomy and distributed knowledge construction. This makes it challenging to enact teaching presence at scale without undermining the connectivist design. The paper explicitly highlights that, despite recognition of teaching presence as important, how to provide it in cMOOCs remains unresolved, motivating their exploration of PCA-mediated facilitation.

References

Strengthening teaching presence is consistently identified as a key lever for improving both presences \citep{zou_exploring_2021, shea_reexamination_2010}, but how to provide such support in cMOOCs---where formal facilitation is intentionally minimal---remains an open question.

— Designing Human-GenAI Interaction for cMOOC Discussion Facilitation: Effects of a Collaborative AI-in-the-Loop Workflow on Social and Cognitive Presence  (2603.29285 - Xiao et al., 31 Mar 2026) in Section 3.2.1 “Empirical Evidence from MOOC Contexts” (Related Work)