This conceptual paper sets out the community-of-inquiry framework from a distributed perspective. It proposes that considering teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence from a distributed perspective allows the broadening of the presences to consider the way in which participants, content and tools maintain and advance these presences. Distance education is problematic since the separation of instructor and student necessitates a change of pedagogy. The paper argues that by distributing the typical silos of 'teaching' and 'learning', more flexible opportunities are enabled. The distribution of the three presences across participants, content and tools is proposed as one way of mitigating distances in distance education. It is recommended that the proposed model be subject to empirical research to ascertain the usefulness of the model in practice.