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self-efficacy can be viewed as a subjective judgment of one’s level of competence in executing certain behaviors or achieving certain outcomes in the future. Self-efficacy has been identified as the best predictor of college GPA and among the best predictors of college persistence through meta-analytic research (Robbins et al., 2004). Further, commenting on the state of the art in self-regulated learning research Winne suggested that self-regulation is contingent on positive self-efficacy beliefs, arguing that “learners must subscribe to a system of epistemological and motivational beliefs that classifies failure as an occasion to be informed, a condition that is controllable, and a stimulus to spend effort to achieve better” (Winne, 2005). This contrast of failure attribution as trait (e.g., “I’m just not good at math”) versus failure as occasion to be informed (“I can control, adapt, and learn from this”) is a classic view of maladaptive and adaptive self-efficacy beliefs.

In the current study we therefore examine the relationship between CoI constructs and elements of self efficacy in order to begin to investigate the larger theme of collaborative online learner regulation and learning presence.

Thus, self-efficacy is “concerned not with what one has but with belief in what one can do with whatever resources one can muster” (Bandura, 2007, p. 6).

Bandura has noted that slightly elevated efficacy can have a bigger impact on subsequent performance. Overestimating one’s capabilities to produce a behavior and outcome may boost performance and give rise to motivation to persist in face of obstacles and seatback, while the opposite is true for underestimating one’s capabilities, which may suppress productive goals, persistence and effort (Bandura, 2007). Thus there is an important connection between self-efficacy, effort, and subsequent performance.

Positive psychological and emotional states in the aftermath of successful execution of certain academic behaviors naturally lead to sense of competence and subsequently results in enhanced sense of efficacy.

We suggest here that elements within the CoI framework may serve as mechanisms for supporting self-efficacy. Specifically we conjecture that effective teaching presence and positive social presence should serve as sources of social persuasion and positive affect supportive of self-efficacy.

(Bandura, 1997). These and other studies have suggested that self-efficacy has a substantial role in predicting student engagement, motivation and performance ( [Bong, 2004], [Caraway et al., 2003], [Chemers et al., 2001], [Choi, 2005], [Smith et al., 2001] and [Vrugt et al., 2002]).

The participants in the study were a random sample of 3165 students from 42 two- and four-year institutions in New York State.

Gaining knowledge about the reasons for learning and achievement of online students has attracted a great deal of attention among both researchers and practitioners. Understanding the factors that have an influence on the success of online education has significant implications for designing productive online communities.

Reviewing studies that investigated elements of online learner self-regulation

This ongoing project to document all instances of teaching, social, and cognitive presence in complete online courses also resulted in identification of learner discourse that did not fit within the model, i.e. could not be reliably coded as indicators of teaching, social, or cognitive presence ( [Shea, 2010] and [Shea et al., 2010]).

Additional work on the CoI model (Shea, Vickers, & Hayes, 2010) suggested that past research methods may have resulted in a systematic under representation of the instructional effort involved in online education.

These exceptions represent interesting data for refining and enhancing the model as they suggest that learners are attempting to accomplish goals that are not accounted for within the CoI framework.

In this paper we examine the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) suggesting that the model may be enhanced through a fuller articulation of the roles of online learners. We present the results of a study of 3165 students in online and hybrid courses from 42 two- and four-year institutions in which we examine the relationship between learner self-efficacy measures and their ratings of the quality of their learning in virtual environments. We conclude that a positive relationship exists between elements of the CoI framework and between elements of a nascent theoretical construct that we label “learning presence”. We suggest that learning presence represents elements such as self-efficacy as well as other cognitive, behavioral, and motivational constructs supportive of online learner self-regulation.

the CoI framework attempts to articulate the social, technological, and pedagogical processes that engender collaborative knowledge construction. It therefore represents an effort to resolve the greatest challenge to the quality of online education

Learner discussions also included efforts to divide up tasks, manage time, and set goals in order to successfully complete group projects. As such they appeared to be indicators of online learner self and co-regulation, which can be viewed as the degree to which students in collaborative online educational environments are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in the learning process (Winters & Azevedo, 2005).

the authors concluded that all the studies converged on advantageous outcomes for providing support for “metacognitive” learning strategies including self-reflection, self-explanation, and self-monitoring.

successfully orchestrating a dialogue demands fairly sophisticated skills. Conversational contributions need to be simultaneously parsed according to their disciplinary value, their location within the chain of collective argumentation, their relevance to the instructional goals, and their role as indicators of the student’s ongoing understanding. The outcome of this complex appraisal is a sense of the amount and quality of the guidance that specific contributions and the conversation as a whole require to support learning.” (Larreamendy-Joerns & Leinhardt, p. 591)

Zhao et al. also concluded that studies in which instructor interaction with students was medium to high resulted in better learning outcomes for online students relative to classroom learners.

Additional online observing tools from Astronomy magazine