The most important distance education research areas
Olaf Zawacki-Richter published a Delphi study on Research Areas in Distance Education. It had three purposes: “Firstly, to develop a categorization of research areas in distance education; secondly, to identify the most important research areas in distance education; and thirdly, to identify the most neglected research areas in distance education”. 15 research areas at three broad meta-levels of distance education research were derived:
- Macro level: Distance education systems and theories
- Access, equity and ethics
- Theories and models
- Globalization of education and cross-cultural aspects
- Distance education systems and institutions
- Research methods in distance education and knowledge transfer
- Meso level: management, organization, and technology
- Innovation and change
- Quality assurance
- Costs and benefits
- Professional development and faculty support
- Learner support services
- Educational technology
- Management and organization
- Micro level: teaching and learning in distance education
- Interaction and communication in learning communities
- Instructional design
- Learner characteristics
Educational technology is just one of the items, but one may argue that technology may have an important role for others, e.g access, interaction and communication in learning communities, learner support services or instructional design. Technology-supported designs also exist for areas like innovation and change or even DT systems and institutions...
Reference: Zawacki-Richter, O. 2009. Research Areas in Distance Education: A Delphi Study. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning [Online] 10:3. Available: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/674/1260 under by-nc-nd.
Note: I am pleased to see that the author uses boxplots to present the experts' ratings on the importance of research areas since just 2 hours ago I added some stuff about boxplots in the exploratory data analysis entry (part of a unfinished methodology tutorial I sometimes work on ....)
