Supporting Metacognition in Online, Professional Graduate Courses

This paper presents a model for metacognitive learning evaluation in a community of inquiry and discusses how it may be used to incentivize effective learning in online graduate courses. We identify patterns of behavior and peer-learner interactions that indicate social engagement in community model building, based on an extensive, qualitative analysis of online course discussions and student interaction data. We explore how metacognitive learning develops through socially-situated knowledge construction and demonstrate how community interactions result in deep learning. An extrinsic reward structure is suggested, in the form of a grading rubric that appears to encourage students to experiment with behaviors that provide the intrinsic rewards of metacognitive learning.