Panel: National Research Agenda

1.
2.
“Research”
Kinzie: NSSE as one example of
current national research
Ehrmann: national research that
could help advance one type of
transformation, locally &
nationally
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
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Your Part

3. Suggestions for research that
could help advance your institution’s
work in this arena (10 minutes)
• e.g., Development of funding for
transportation systems research
• Small group of institutions has far more
influence on research agendas than one
“unique” institution
• Cards on the table
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3
“Accountability”?
Common definition
Our View
Stick
Guidance, carrot,
stick
“Them”
Self, colleagues,
students, alumni,
taxpayers…
Informed
assistance?
Budget cuts?
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Groping Our Way
Into a
Bigger, More Dangerous World
Some National Research Priorities
Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D.
Director, The Flashlight Program
Thanks!
 180+ institutional subscribers to TLT Group
services
 Annenberg/CPB and AAHE
 Washington State Univ., St. Edward’s
University, Notre Dame…
 EDUCAUSE/NLII, AAC&U, AASCU, ACA,
League for Innovation...
 TLT Group Founding Sponsors
 Blackboard, Compaq, Microsoft, SCT,
WebCT
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Outline
I. Describe this “transformation”
II. Four families of national research
that are likely to be useful locally:
1)
2)
3)
4)
Tracking the transformation in order to
draw resources to it
Exploring the transformation in order to
clarify strategy
Testing the theory underlying the
transformation in order to make choices
Diagnosing barriers to the
transformation in order to increase
participation
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Toward More Distributed
Learning Environments
 ‘Before’: “All the world is divided into two
parts…”
 From isolated single hierarchy to multicenter, connected
 Metaphor(1987): mainframe, to dumb
terminals, to distributed computing
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Transformation (as I glimpse it)
 Increased use of technology in the
world and in education
 helps many more learners, experts,
others
 to each get to, and interact with,
 more (kinds of) resources, learning
experiences, and people (often more
specialized than before the
transformation)
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A Few of the Dangers
 Over-promising and disillusion; funding
backlash
 Staff burnout
 Red ink
 Exclusion of those who are always excluded
 Students cheated with shoddy intellectual
resources, sterile learning, worthless degrees
 (etc.)
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1. Tracking
 With what are students learning (origin of
resources)?
 With whom are students learning (peers,
experts) – should be widening
 How: Emergence of new instructional models
built on reach for greater diversity of
resources, people; advantages of scale
 U of St. Thomas MBA program for medical group
managers – national faculty, national student body
 MIT Cultura Project
 Online 24 x 7 reference librarians or teaching
assistants
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2. Developing Theory
 Basic research on how media choices affect
communication, collaboration
 For example
 Start with faculty, students who are skilled at
conversation, problem-solving in various
communications forms, from classrooms, to chat
rooms, to threaded discussion, to video
conferencing
 Test to see how changes in communications
architecture affects the ability of these
experimenting courses to carry out various
activities.
 For example, does “face to face” in a classroom of
30 tend to have distinctive advantages over other
architectures for courses of that size?
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3. Testing Theory


Do institutions with unusually high
technology use also feature unusually high
levels of some/all of the 7 principles
Do 30-40 student hybrid/blended courses
that encourage interaction foster better
student-student collaboration and studentfaculty bonding than purely f2f courses of
comparable size and emphasis? What are
the relative retention rates?
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4. Diagnostic Tools
 Purpose: help identify barriers to
participation for individuals or groups in
order to lower those barriers
 Examples of Flashlight diagnostic
assessment tools
 Survey to help faculty and institutions spot
barriers to online collaboration among students
 Cost Handbook to help faculty and institutions
more easily assess how working faculty are using
time (e.g., for undergraduate engineering
laboratories) in order to help redesign the tasks
 Increase rewarding uses of time, decrease stress
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Benefits of Such Research
 Findings
 Tools that others can use to study
similar phenomena in their own
context (“All education is local”)
 Existence proofs discovered in one
locale can be useful for other locales
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TLT Group’s Flashlight Program
 Subscriber-supported work on
assessment tools, training, consulting,
etc.
 We’re interested in working on these
issues, with you, NLII, NSSE…
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