Community of Inquiry as a Complex Communicative System

Complexity theory has been steadily gaining recognition over the last half a century as a new way of understanding the organization of systems on all levels—whether organisms, social systems, business organizations, or ecosystems. Contrary to a mechanistic, analytic approach to the study of phenomena, the complexity perspective takes into account all interactions between the components of a system, which it understands as in dynamic interplay. In this paper, I will attempt to re-describe community of inquiry (CI) as a complex system, and draw some implications that follow from taking into account such description.