Unisa2019 keynote2

Editor's Notes

• #3: I will cover the more general part of our talk related to research into ODE. …and I will advocate systematic reviews as an appropriate approach to support evidence-based practice in online distance education. Then over to Terry, who will elaborate of the process of developing a research agenda, which can be an agenda for a whole nation, for an institution like UNISA or for an individual researcher in the early stages of her or his academic career. We edited a book together that was published in 2014: ODE – Towards a research agenda. And Terry will give an update of current issues in ODE research in the second part of our keynote address.
• #4: Universität (vom lateinischen universitas magistrorum et scholarium, „Gemeinschaft der Lehrenden und Lernenden“)
• #6: My vision or wish for the COER would be that the COER will be the international research hub for research into open education. This of course depends on the people who work with and in the COER. And I think, we have put together a great team But before I introduce the founding COER members, I would like to say a few words about the notion of Open Education…
• #7: And last but not least we currently developing a new fully online Masater of Management of Technology-Enhanced Learning Program, the MTEL, that will be offered through the Center for Lifelong Learning. Accreditation will be done next year and we will start to enroll students in the winter term 2019/2020. I am very glad about our cooperation with the University of South Africa. Here our Vice-Presidents (Professor Gugo Moche) are signing a Memorandum of Agreement between UNISA and Oldenburg. Within the MTEL we are offering a certificate program for professional development at UNISA: Module 1: Principles, Theory, and Practice of Technology Enhanced Learning Module 2: Learner Support in Technology Enhanced Learning Module 3: Design of Technology Enhanced Learning Environments Module 4: International and Transnational Education Issues in Technology Enhanced Learning
• #9: In education we often face problems or open questions with regard to a pedagogical intervention. For example, video-based instruction. Do students learn better with video-based lectures? What are the advantages or disadvantages? How do I best present my content in a video lecture?
• #13: Does educational research need to be relevant? If yes, what constitutes relevant research? And what is relevant? Relevance of research is always context bound. What is relevant for one group can be irrelevant for another. Relevance is often defined by a political agenda. And what is considered as relevant is in turn often funded by state funding agencies etc. But we have to be careful. We must preserve our academic freedom and drive our own research agendas. This means that research does not always have to be directly usable. Sometimes we wish to do research simply because it is beautiful. Research is the most glorious form of play. Now after these very general remarks we should turn our attention to ODE. The first step towards a research agenda is to define the structure of the field with its research areas in order to be able to quantify what as been done in the past and to identify gaps for further research.
• #15: In order to develop a validated classification system of research areas in distance education, I carried out a Delphi study, which is a method to reach consensus among a group of experts. I approached members of editorial boards of leading distance education journals. That was when I met Terry... 25 individual were on the expert panel. They came from 11 different countries, reporting an average of 27 years of professional experience in distance education. In the first round the experts were asked to list 10 important research areas.
• #16: Three major lines of research or broad meta-levels of distance education research were derived from the expert's responses in the Delphi study… Which is the level of the individual learner
• #17: Within these three levels, the research issues that are considered important by the experts were categorised into the following 15 research areas…
• #18: OK, in order to investigate how research in ODE has developed, we can follow a bibliographic approach using content analysis, because research in communicated in scientific journals.
• #22: OK, this concept map shows the overall scope of the journal over the whole 35year time period. Red bubble: education, Turqoise: research, Green: Students, Yellow: learning. The journal publishes research on education and the two major themes students and learning are connected via interaction. This is of course not a surprising result, but at least it shows the validity of Leximancer as a useful text-mining tool. To reveal trends in distance education research we looked at the following 7 five year time periods.
• #23: This first time period between 1980 and 84 I call Professionalization and institutional consolidation. At the end of the 1960s and in the 70s the major Open Universites were esteblished, all teaching at a distance 1980 marks the beginning of the professionalization of distance education as a scholarly discipline. Desmond Keegan published the first paper in the first issue on defining distance education. Authors were most concerned with identity formation of distance education as a unique and legitimate field of scholarship, as well as the emergence and recognition of distance educators as professionals. During the first decade researchers – as reflective practitioners – were were writing about the challenges around the establishment of these newly founded distance teaching universities. The concept institutions and Open University form thematic region of their own, linked with policies. There is a great deal of interest during this early period on understanding the nature, scope and functions of these organizations on a macro-level, and ways in which their operations differed from conventional educational institutions.
• #24: The period 1985-1989 began to see a few other challenges coming to the fore and occupying the interest of researchers. These included best practices for course design in distance education and the adoption and integration of educational technologies. Distance education demanded and needed innovative solutions to the challenges posed by the separation of the learners from their teachers and the learning organization. Consequently, instructional design, media and educational technology emerge as new concepts in the concept map for this period. There is growing interest in the challenges of teaching and learning of specifc content areas, courses and curricular. How to teach history, chemistry or foreign languages at a distance?
• #25: An attraction of the growing numbers of distance teaching institutions was their ability to offer educational opportunities to large numbers of students at economies of scale with paper-based study materials to high numbers of students. But the growth of large-scale open and distance education institutions – the so-called mega universities serving hundred thousands of students – brought with them high attrition rates and issues around the quality of educational provision. So quality problems emerged... Researchers around this time began to develop tools and strategies to understand why students were dropping out from distance education or withdrawing, as well as why they were continuing with their studies. These considerations led to student support being acknowledged as a ‘critical link in distance education’. This included use of newer and emerging technologies such as remote audio- and videoconferencing systems to support students. These tools were becoming more widely used in the 1990s to facilitate two- way interaction among teachers and students. However, synchronous communication comes with reduced flexibility and scalability.
• #26: 1995 to 1999: Student attrition and quality assurance remains an important concern. The key for ensuring high quality learning experiences in distance education was seen to be in the design of student-centered learning experiences and support systems with a focus on the needs and prior knowledge of the individual learner. The concepts of instructional design and development are linked with materials and students via ‘support’ in the thematic region of learning. By now the Internet and the Web had been around for a few years, and the latter part of the 1990s began to see some interest in the potentials of virtual learning. However, the majority of these reports at this early stage of web-based learning and teaching were single case studies of projects, initiatives and pilot courses by early adopters, reflecting a ‘lone-ranger approach’ (Bates, 2000, p. 59), rather than a strategic, institution-wide initiative. At this stage, the concepts of educational technology, information and technology did not form a thematic region of its own. This changed in the next time period.
• #27: …The emergence of the virtual university (2000-2004). The early years of the new millennium saw online learning moving into the mainstream of distance education provision, with growing interest in virtual learning and notions of the virtual university. And around this time there is a clear shift in publications towards research on online learning. Concepts such as learning, educational technology, online, course and delivery are appearing as connected. 54 of 75 articles published between 2000 and 2004 deal explicitly with the development and design of online learning. Researchers are fascinated by the enormous opportunities that the new information and communication technologies afford for collaborative online learning and teaching.
• #28: The second half of the first decade in the new millennium begins to see a picture of distance education emerging that would transform its face and image as we had known it. Online education is beginning to be seen as the new face of distance education. And because online education is new and technology driven, it is attractive and fashionable to all, and not just distance educators. Several studies around this time seek to understand how collaborative learning occurs and how meaning is articulated and negotiated in light of constructivist instructional designs. Several case studies and studies of innovative instructional designs published around this time explore the full potential of digital media in collaborative online learning. As computer-mediated communication is mainly text-based and the data is easily available there are many studies investigation online interaction patterns. You see here that discussion and interaction form a thematic region of its own.
• #29: Over the next five years (2010–2014), the theme interaction, continues to be the critical mediator between students, and learning, while the design of technology-enhanced collaborative learning experiences remains the major focus of the articles. This period also marks the emergence of MOOCs. With growing interest in open educational resources (OERs), there is increasing fascination with MOOCs, here... Linked with education. Two special issues of the journal pick up these themes for more in-depth exploration, ‘OERs and social inclusion’ (2012) and ‘MOOCs: Emerging research’ (2014). OERs are also a big feature of the special themed issue of the journal on ‘Distance education for empowerment and development in Africa’ (2011).
• #30: Along those lines, the research perspectives alternate between institutional and individual or macro and micro level issues. That’s why I speak about three waves of research. There is an innovation, a trigger or a specific challenge on the macro level (the establishment of the Open Universities, quality problems and the emergence of the Virtual University), and institutions respond to that with actions, practices and considerations on the micro level: instructional design, student support, opportunities for social learning and online interaction. And this is mirrored by the research publications. This also nicely shows that research emerges from practice and specific problems, interventions or disruptive innovations and the results should feed back and inform practice as a contribution to the professionalization of our field.
• #31: I finally would like to make the point that systematic reviews are a very effective way to inform evidence-based practice, but also to gain a systematic and reproducable overview of a specific content or research area – which is so important for example when you start work on your Ph.D. I think this is highly recommendable, and all my doctoral students have to do a systematic review on their topic at the beginning of their research.
• #32: We see a clear trend towards evidence-based practice and policy. How can we provide objective evidence to inform practice? By conducting primary empirical research that collects data about the real world. But – as Nordenbo said – "Rather than looking at any study in isolation, we need to look at the body of evidence". How is this “second-order” data presented in “reality”? In the form of published research. The aim is to show systematically that existing primary research results contain arguments to shape and inform practice and policies.
• #33: It goes beyond the scope of this talk to explain how to do a systematic reviews. This could be the topic of a workshop maybe for my next visit in South Africa. But a systematic review follows a very clear and structured process of developing a review question and a corresponding search string, explicit criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of studies that are documented in a review protocol and the synthesis of qualitative and quantitative results that are reported in the review.
• #34: Relevance is context bound…
• #36: This figure from Borah and colleagues who analysed the time and workers needed to conduct systematic reviews of medical interventions, shows the filtering process across 195 systematic reviews. You see here that there is a wide range of included studies in the review at each stage, And furthermore that the filtration process can be dramatic, the average yield rate is below 3 %! Aggregated literature filtration process based on counts reported (n=195). Trimmed means are indicated in the boxes and trimmed ranges (±2.5 SDs) are indicated at the right and left of each level. Some reviews were published reporting that zero studies met the criteria for inclusion in the review.
• #37: Some people may say that primary research is worth more than secondary research. But I think that Systematic Reviews are an original scientific achievement in their own right. The whole is even more than the sum of its parts.
• #41: How do we develop a research agenda? A research agenda, in any given discipline, can be defined as an ongoing, iterative process consisting of six interdependent activities (Zawacki-Richter & Anderson, 2013): (1) quantify what research has previously been done, (2) review and evaluate that research, (3) describe new research needs on the basis of the quantification and evaluation (4) prioritize the research needs in a "research agenda", (5) perform and evaluate the new research, and by doing so, (6) redefine the research agenda.
• #64: It is also discussed in the literature about qualitative research methods that text-mining tools like Leximancer could be used to validate qualitative text analysis, for example by Harwood, Gapp and Stewart: Cross-check for completeness: exploring a novel use of Leximancer in a Grounded Theoy study. They conclude: Leximancer is not a panacea, it still requires analytical sensitivity and judgment in its interpretation … Leximancer enables the analyst to make sense of large narrative data sets with minimal manual coding”. But of course you need a profound knowledge of the subject matter to do this interpretation.
• #68: This figure plots the standardized frequencies of the concepts computer, tool(s), students, and learning over time. It is interesting to observe this shift throughout the lifetime of the journal from a focus on computers and technology for computer-based instruction to a view of computers as tools for collaborative learning and the adoption of student-centered approaches to instructional design and learning.
• #69: 1 – Science proceeds by asking important questions about the real world that lead to hypothesis that can be tested. 2 – Most research is concerned with developing and testing theories – Theory guides research and research leads to revision on theory – they are interconnected. 3 – The research methods should be derived from the research question – and not vice versa. 4 – With regorous reasoning I mean the logical links between empirical observations, underlying theory and the questions or problems that are in focus of the investigation. 5 – It is of course challenging in education to provide evidence of replicability and generalizability – but I think we should do more replication studies to provide more evidence in different contexts and more data to carry out second order research. 6 – And finally, be an open scholar! Share your data and your instruments to encourage professional scrutiny and critique