The purpose of the present study was to provide a comprehensive and descriptive review of the earlier research done on the refinement of the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000, 2001, 2010) that has greatly influenced both research and practice in online education so far. To this end, the current review included peer-reviewed journal articles only by handling them both individually and determining their common theoretical and methodological aspects. The results revealed that previous research produced very significant insights into the revision of the framework by producing four new presence types and seven presence dimensions. However, there were some theoretical, methodological and empirical gaps that need to be addressed in the future. Specifically speaking, these gaps ranged from addressing certain educational contexts to focusing on statistical significance only in some of earlier research. Accordingly, all the findings led to the conclusion that addressing the existing gaps in further research would enrich our understanding of the Community of Inquiry framework thereby adding to the contributions of previous revision studies done on it and positively impacting online learning research and practice.

Keywords

adult learning · learning communities · cooperative/collaborative learning · distance education and telelearning · computer-mediated communication