RESEARCH ON ONLINE LEARNING

The second session of the Sloan-C Summer Workshop focused on research and how it might help us meet this challenge. In particular, presenters in this session were charged with addressing what the research to date can tell us about student, faculty and institutional change, what directions for future research seem most promising, and what we really need to do to move research on online learning to more rigorous and more informative levels.The papers they wrote are collected in this section. They include: a critical review of what the research literature can tell us about blended learning relative to each of Sloan-C’s five pillars of quality in online learning; two papers on one of the more promising lines of research in online learning, research involving the Community of Inquiry framework; an intriguing look at what very large data sets and innovative methodologies can tell us about our students and their reactions to blended course offerings; and an equally provocative thought piece on research on online learning in general which asks us to reconsider how we frame that enterprise, arguing that research on online education might generate more meaningful outcomes. The papers are both informative and thought-provoking, and although they may generate more questions than they answer, they clearly suggest directions for future research that could move ourunderstanding of online education forward in interesting and important ways.