I Built an Avatar and Forgot Everything I Knew About Presence

Aug 23 / LumenVie

What creating an AI faculty for LumenVie re-taught me about Community of Inquiry, authenticity, and online learning

I really messed up. And I should have known better.

As the associate director of digital learning at a public institution, I know a lot about the community of inquiry framework. I have spent years talking about presence, especially in online courses where folks are not meeting in person or in real time. I spent hours reading research on it, writing about it, using the framework in trainings.

But what did I do?


I didn’t follow my own advice or use my own logic when it came to applying the Community of Inquiry framework to my microlearning platform. I threw all my logic out the window and got too caught up in the newest technology.


And this… is how it all started.


During the pandemic lockdowns, I came up with the idea to build a community of practice for educators as we figured out how to transition faculty to teach online. The idea grew even more when we returned to campus after the pandemic, and AI started to take off. Eventually, I created a microlearning platform called LumenVie. Part of this bright idea of mine was to create an avatar-based faculty that could help deliver content and make the learning experience more engaging through storytelling.


And, if I am being fairly honest, there was also a practical reason.


I know I am not the most interesting person to listen to for hours at a time. As an ESL learner, with a stutter that comes out sometimes, and a quirky New York accent (hey, yo, you…), I thought avatars could help, you know… make me a little more presentable on the interwebs and socials. The only problem was that I am not an animator, illustrator, or character designer, and this is where AI came in and made it possible for me to experiment with something I probably would never have attempted a few years ago.

So I created several faculty avatars based on my roles in higher education over the years. Each has a name, personality, role, and visual identity that lived in my mind.  And the other part of this project was to create DS, an avatar meant to represent me on the platform and give me some kind of “presence” on it.  I liked DS. DS was my alternate personality, or at least how I thought I would sound if I presented myself as a bit more scholarly in academic spaces (yes, imposter syndrome is real, my friends, especially when you are also working through a dissertation…) 


Apparently, DS was not enough to create a sense of presence.


After I finished the avatars, I created some animations and shared them with my pilot testing groups. The feedback was good. People liked the idea. They liked the characters. They could see how an avatar-based faculty might work within short-form learning. I knew the idea was solid and maybe, just maybe, there was interest in something like LumenVie in the micro-learning spaces.


Then I started reading the comments and feedback about DS.

Folks who actually knew me and my work in higher education kept saying the same thing. DS doesn’t feel like you, DS doesn’t sound like you. So, I created varying forms of DS, still missing that point. The avatar versions all looked and sounded fine. Nothing was wrong with DS. In fact, I used a version of it for my dissertation survey campaign and got many respondents when I posted participant request videos using DS. But those folks didn't know me, and those who did couldn’t connect DS to the person they knew. The character on the screen just wasn't me.


The sense of presence, or should I say my presence, just wasn’t there.


A wow moment, for sure, that completely went over my head when I was developing DS.

So, What Exactly Is Community of Inquiry?

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework is a way to think about what makes an educational experience meaningful, especially in online learning spaces.

The framework grew out of research conducted by Randy Garrison, Terry Anderson, and Walter Archer around computer-assisted education. At the core of the framework is the idea of creating three types of “presence”. These three elements are interconnected and are classified as social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. The framework argues that a deep, meaningful educational experience develops through the interaction of all three, not through any one of them operating alone.

That last part is important.

We sometimes talk about online education as though good content is enough. Record the lecture, upload the readings, build the quiz, add a discussion board, and you are done. But learning doesn't quite work that way. A course can have excellent information and still feel strangely empty to the learner without interaction. The Community of Inquiry framework helps explain why presence matters in these spaces, especially on microlearning platforms. Let’s take a look at what presence actually means within the CoI. 

The Elements of Presence 

Social Presence: Is Anyone Actually Here?
Social presence deals with our ability to present ourselves within a learning community as real people. Not simply names on a discussion board, faces in little Zoom squares, or accounts inside an LMS or even a talking avatar. The original framework describes it as the learners' ability to represent and project themselves socially into the community. That includes things like open communication, interaction, connection, trust, and eventually a sense of belonging within that learning environment.

That's where my DS problem suddenly became painfully obvious. I had created a representation of myself without really asking whether people would recognize me in DS. I was too busy thinking about visual consistency, animation, character design, and whether the avatar’s clothes looked right. And that was ok for my other avatars, but for DS, I was not thinking enough about whether the person on the other side of the screen would feel that there was someone there, in this case me, a higher educational professional building the brand.

That was a very difficult design question I sat with for a long time.

Teaching Presence: Someone Has to Design the Experience
Teaching presence is more than an instructor appearing in a video. In CoI, it involves designing, facilitating, and directing the learning experience. That means organizing the course, setting expectations, facilitating interactions, explaining concepts, providing guidance, and helping learners move toward meaningful outcomes.

This especially matters when we start using AI-generated content, avatars, and other technologies. An avatar can deliver information, but it cannot automatically create teaching presence. Neither can a cinematic video, an AI chatbot, or a beautifully designed LMS course with fifteen tabs, twenty-seven icons, and an announcement telling students to "click here to begin."

We intentionally design teaching presence into the experience through our individual and unique personas. Technology may help us communicate it, but technology does not replace the action of presence itself. That distinction became clearer to me once I started working with the avatars and realized that DS presence did not translate to my uniqueness, even when I incorporated teaching presence through DS.

Cognitive Presence: What Are Learners Doing With All of This?
Then there is cognitive presence. Cognitive presence involves learners' ability to make meaning through reflection, communication, inquiry, and applying ideas. It moves learning from simply encountering information to deciding how to apply that new information to tasks and problem solving. Unlike the other two elements of presence, cognitive presence is a bit different and connects to the learners' judgment and critical thinking. You can think of cognitive presence as a learner's progression from recognizing a question or problem, to exploring solutions, to finding meaning, and eventually applying new knowledge.

For me, this may be one of the most important parts of the framework as we rethink learning in an AI era. Information is no longer difficult to generate. We can create explanations, examples, summaries, videos, simulations, questions, and entire presentations faster than ever before. But generating information is not the same as learning. The real question is what learners are asked to do with that information and how they react to the avatars delivering it.

Are they questioning it, connecting it, testing it, discussing it, applying it, changing their minds because of it? And is the avatar the best delivery method for cognitive exploration, or is a human teaching presence more effective? Cognitive presence matters for LumenVie because if learners aren't stimulated by the avatar visuals, cognition stalls when they are too busy questioning the content-delivery format.

And Then There Is Authenticity

Authenticity is not one of the three formal presences in the Community of Inquiry framework. But my experience with DS made me think much more carefully about its relationship to presence. If social presence depends partly on our ability to present ourselves as real people within a learning community, then what happens when the “person” learners encounter is intentionally artificial?

That is not just an avatar question. It is quickly becoming an online education question. We now have AI-generated instructors, synthetic voices, automated feedback, chatbots, virtual tutors, avatars, and increasingly sophisticated digital agents entering educational environments. I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing. I am building with some of those technologies myself. My mistake was not creating the DS avatar. My mistake was assuming that visual representation automatically created a connection.


It didn't.


For people who didn't know me, DS may have simply looked like another member of the LumenVie avatar faculty. For folks who did know me, something was off. The character didn't match their experience of me.  And it reminded me that authenticity online doesn't necessarily mean just showing up on camera but creating enough consistency between our voice, personality, communication, behavior, and digital representation that learners understand who or what they are interacting with.

Microlearning Platforms Need Presence Too

It's easy to think presence on microlearning platforms doesn't matter because the content is shorter. I am beginning to think the opposite. When learners spend less time on your platform, they have fewer opportunities to establish connections. In a traditional semester-long course, an instructor may have sixteen weeks to develop relationships, clarify expectations, respond to questions, facilitate discussions, and establish a recognizable voice. A learner completing a ten-minute module does not have sixteen weeks to invest in building relationships and presence. Every interaction and module has to work harder. The messaging, language, feedback, and characters matter much, much more. Microlearning may shorten the content, but it doesn't eliminate the need for human connection, thoughtful instructional design, or meaningful engagement with ideas. I'm revamping DS; she will look and sound similar to my own persona. I am also looking at ways to incorporate multimedia so that the “real DS” shines through. The image of DS in the upper left quadrant is the revamped DS. I feel this is a better representation as she now has my famous curly hair flip and voice.  


This Is Bigger Than My Avatar

My little avatar problem ultimately made me rethink a much larger issue. Does the instruction portray a sense of community and presence to the learner, or are they just consuming content? The CoI framework developed around online communication and presence more than two decades ago now gives us a useful way to rethink our approaches about AI-mediated learning. Technology is advancing more quickly these days, but the underlying challenge for online education and training remains: how do we create meaningful educational experiences when teachers and learners don't necessarily share the same physical space, and what does that presence look like now that AI is in the picture?


Looking back, I was asking the wrong questions when I created DS. I should have started with: Will learners feel that someone real is actually here? That question changes everything about how I will move forward with LumenVie. Because presence isn't something we add after the technology has finished rendering the content, or in this case the avatar. Presence is part of the design. I knew that. I just needed a mismatched AI-generated version of myself to remind me.


Created with