As the title of this post came through your aggregator, it caught your eye didn’t it? You are probably only reading this post to see what in the world I have to say about research that would make it sexy, huh? Are you reading this post because you are interested in distance learning research (and other members of the BlogTracks group don’t count!) or because my title was interesting?
Exactly.
We have an inherent weakness as human beings of attending to or focusing on what is interesting, rather than what is important, or credible. As much as we would like to believe that this is not true in the area of educational research, it unfortunately is true. This was driven home for me this last year at AECT in Orlando. I had two main papers that I presented individually. One was a year-long project with a large qualitative data set and very rigorous, collaborative analysis. The findings of this study were published in a well-read publication, and the project built the foundation for future projects and papers.
How many people came to my presentation of this study at AECT? One! There were issues involved, such as the hour of the presentation and the day. But still — just one person!
Contrast this with the other presentation I gave, which presented findings from a quick project thrown together in spare time. This second study used much weaker methods, was thinner on the theoretical/analytical foundation, and was more contextualized instead of generalizable.
How many people came to this presentation? About 40. The room was full, and there were many questions and much interaction.
What was the difference between these two presentations? The second study had a much more interesting title. More than that, I think, it was a study of sexy, new, interesting technologies: Blogs and wikis. The first study, attended by only one person, discussed the integration of more general technologies. I joked with a friend of mine after the presentation that I need to create a new, sexy word for a new, fun technology so that I can have another packed presentation next year. We would call the technology, “Sblogs” or “super-blogs” and fill the seats, regardless of what we said about this imagined tool!
This scenario has happened to me a couple of times. In fact it happened again this year at AERA, where 80 people attended the presentation of a paper that has been rejected by two journals, and the paper currently in press was attended by one. Oye! As a researcher, it worries me that the more significant research might be unseen, unread, and unapplied. We need to try harder to not let ourselves be distracted by sexy titles about fun, exciting (but largely untested) technologies).
We also need to focus more on research that will be more useful, and have a larger impact, and this is really the point to this long post. What is the single most-used educational technology in higher education today, other than common office software? Course management systems. Over 95% of higher education institutions use a CMS (1), which trumps almost any other kind of technology out there. However, there is a disturbing lack of research about CMS technologies. I recently completed a project about Blackboard at Brigham Young University, and in my review of the literature found 164 published articles that mentioned course management systems, Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, CMS, or other similar terms in the abstracts. Almost all of these, however, were “rah, rah” articles without a basis in data, or else quickie studies that consisted of a post-course evaluation of small sample sizes.Less than 10 studies attempted a more general evaluation of the impact from using a CMS over multiple contexts, such as multiple university departments.
I wondered if I had not reviewed the literature correctly. Was I missing some keyword that reveal where all the good CMS research is hiding? Apparently not. While presenting this research at AERA today, another doctoral student, interested in doing a dissertation about CMSs, confirmed that she also could not find much in the literature that used any substantial amounts of data. She also could not find almost any presentations at AERA, other than my own, about CMSs.
I know studying CMS technologies is not as exciting as studying blogs, or wikis, or simulations, or MMOGs, or MUVEs, or (fill in the blank). But this is work that still needs to be done. How could a technology sneak in and grab such a stranglehold on higher education without being properly studied and analyzed? All of our research now will be post-implementation, and if our findings are negative, will it matter, because institutions are now committed to using a CMS? Have we failed as educational technology researchers to not thoroughly investigate a new technology before it became so widely adopted?
It seems that this is a hole in the literature, and a hole in our research, and this applies to our thinking about online learning since, often unfortunately, most courses are placed online through the assistance of a CMS. More importantly, we need to consider what this means in a more general sense. How much does the choice of what we research hinge on how interesting and popular a technology is, compared with what its potential impact might be to improve or impede learning?
References
(1) Pollack, T. A. (2003). Using a course management system to improve instruction. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association of Small Computer Users in Education, held at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Tag: AECT 2006
