1.1 Research Background
Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, online/distance learning is growing rapidly around the world. With the stabilization of the epidemic, teaching and learning in the post-epidemic era can never go back and should not return to the old way of education (Zhao & Wang, 2020). Blended learning has become the best choice to follow the trend of the times and meet the learning needs of students. The general blended instructional design for college teachers lacks guidance on relevant pedagogy to accommodate the different blended instructional environments. Realizing the importance of teaching models, educators and researchers have begun to explore the role and impact of different teaching models in guiding and building a comprehensive view of blended learning.
Various teaching and learning models have gradually captured the limelight in the long history of blended learning development. The community of inquiry (CoI) framework, one of the online and blended learning models, was created by Canadian scholars Garrison et al. (2001) to create an environment in which teachers and students could perceive the presence of learning in online or blended settings. They developed the concept of presence, a psychological representation of being present and connected (Greene, 1973; Tremmel, 1993), into a blended learning community constructed by the triad of cognitive presence, teaching presence, and social presence to facilitate active student inquiry, the community of inquiry. It is important to note that the CoI model has been identified as one of the most widely used frameworks in online teaching and learning (Castellanos-Reyes, 2020).
There are an increasing number of articles exploring the characteristics and strategies of teaching and learning in blended learning environments using the CoI framework as the theoretical basis. The CoI framework has become a well-established theory for guiding blended learning. The purpose of this study is to review the existing literature on the CoI framework in blended learning, to elucidate the strategies and methods of blended instructional design based on the CoI framework, and to attempt to form some guidelines for blended instructional design that can be used as a reference for future educators.