Examining reliability and validity of a Korean version of the Community of Inquiry instrument using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis

This study examines the reliability and validity of a Korean version of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) instrument for online learning. The measurement consists of 34 items to evaluate social, teaching, and cognitive presence and was translated from English into Korean for this study. A Cyber University in Seoul, Korea was selected for this study. Data were randomly split into two groups. Three factor-structures of the CoI framework explained 63.82% of the variance in the pattern of relationships among the items using the first split-half sample. All three presences had high reliabilities (all Cronbach's α > .913 or higher). The three-factor structure of the CoI framework with social, teaching, and cognitive presences confirms the validity of the Korean version of the CoI measurement by deleting two items which cross-loaded on multiple factors. Confirmatory factor modeling approach was used to assess the validity of the Korean version using the remaining half sample.