Active learning and sense of community in online classrooms have been linked to persistence, performance, and course satisfaction. A widely applied theoretical framework to describe community-building through discourse and creation of meaningful learning in a classroom is the Community of Inquiry framework, which outlines relationships between social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. Speaking specifically to cognitive presence, learning demands working memory resources to process information, referred to as cognitive load. Using Structural Equation Modeling, this study proposes a structural relationship between Community of Inquiry presences, cognitive load, and learner performance in asynchronous online discussions. Data collected over nine terms with over 2,000 students validate the proposed structural model. By constructing a unifying model, instructors can estimate these mental constructs that cannot be directly quantified and can lead to improved outcomes for students. Specifically, the model can estimate the social and cognitive moves students are making in online discussions to describe the types of active learning that are or are not occurring in a discussion. Future work will include developing machine learning classification techniques to further validate the model by examining presences as they occurred in the course rather than relying on students’ perception of presences.
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