| dc.description.abstract | The California Association of Tactical Officers (CATO) provides tactical training and education for law enforcement in California. It is a non-profit organization dedicated to delivering information, knowledge, and resources to the 80,000 sworn officers in the state who serve 39 million residents. Its goal is to increase professionalism and proficiency by developing best practices for special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams and the law enforcement community. The problem of practice CATO faced was that it wanted to develop live virtual classes that are pertinent and promote critical thinking. The central research problem for this Capstone Project was to inform CATO on how to design virtual learning environments that create a meaningful educational experience. The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework, interviews with key stakeholders, and surveys of participants guided the design of CATO's virtual learning environments. The intent was to create a meaningful educational experience for the students who attend CATO's virtual classes. The design did this by focusing on three interdependent elements: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. These three elements promote the learning process by supporting discourse, setting climate, and selecting content. The design intervention merged the participants' and stakeholders' preferences with the elements of the Community of Inquiry framework. The design intervention was applied to three of CATO's virtual classes. The findings demonstrated an increase in the means for cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. The increase was significant for cognitive presence in all three classes and for teaching presence in two classes. Additionally, Hedges' g found a large effect size for cognitive presence and teaching presence in all the classes and a medium effect size for social presence. Finally, an analysis of the three classes using the Community of Inquiry Coding Template found indicators of the three presences and established that a meaningful educational experience was taking place based on the framework. | en_US |
