In this research to practice full paper we describe our implementation of CoI (Community of Inquiry). CoI is a framework for designing an effective online learning environment. It originates from Charles Sanders Pierce’s ideas that knowledge can only be created in a community through inquiry. We applied the framework in a highly interactive course that was forced to be held online because of the pandemic. The theoretical core of the course is cognitive psychology, a topic considered difficult to learn in a short time. Besides describing our implementation, we evaluate the results of the students’ inquiries and compare it with results from the previous year when we did not use CoI for this part of the course. Our findings show that the most important instructional strategy is to facilitate for students to work individually according to a scientific inquiry and then, in a community, use the knowledge gained in critical discourse to build an overall understanding. When the students worked according to this, the results exceeded our expectations, both regarding the depth of understanding and ability to apply the knowledge in ongoing course projects. Because more teaching will likely take place at a distance in the future, as a side effect of the pandemic, we believe that this could be a way to meet an increasing demand for online instruction, especially when designing educational settings for complex theoretical content.