Abstract
This chapter extends on concepts from Chapter 1, namely the Community of Inquiry framework, and provides a further glimpse into the overarching trends in the more recent literature. Trends in the recent CoI literature include a focus beyond discussion board data, movement into social media, and a focus on big data. The relevance of social presence is explored as a crucial component of the CoI framework. The authors extend the idea of learning in community beyond the traditional learning management system into digital spaces such as social media (e.g., Twitter) that lends itself to analyses of large data sets. This chapter also provides concrete research vignettes into how one researcher has journeyed from single course research using the CoI framework to conceptualizing and designing study across multiple online courses and years of data collection. Such an evolution or transformation from small data research to big data is detailed.