Theme 3

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The articles for this week’s theme are connected to research and research quality on online learning environments. Since the rise of the digital age this topic has been highly discussed but the research regarding the matter has been pore and with low quality. With poorly conducted studies there has been a need to use mixed research to fully address the problems and issues related to the matter.

The first article "Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment" by Martha Cleveland-Innes consists of two main phases which are separated by two main questions. The first questions is whether there is an emotion connected to an online learning environment, and the second phase consists of the reconsideration of the role of emotion in the conceptual model of online learning.

Emotions are an important factor for students’ success in the learning process in an online teaching environment. Research in negative and positive emotions indicate that people that experience stress and anger tend to make more inappropriate decisions than positive emotions.

The article presents the results of a quantitative user study which main target audience were graduate students participating in online courses. The first phase of the study resulted in a more deep understanding of when emotions play a part in online learning environments. The second phase showed that the expressed language in discussion forums lay far beyond the expression of social presence.

The second article “Mixed Research and Online Learning: Strategies for Improvement” by Patrick R. Lowenthal brings up the issues and complexities that arises with research on online learning communities. The article argues that the quantitative data set that has been collected in previous studies on online learning sites can hardly answer all research questions. Often the results have been directly compared to face-to-face learning environments and not looking deeply enough into the dynamics of online learning communities. The non-diversity in research methods has lead to a one-way understanding of the online media, while missing the important nuances that actually do exist.

The article therefor focuses on explaining the importance of using a mixed research processes to fully understand the complexity of online learning issues. The paper also defines and gives a background of what is included in the concept of mixed research and mixed research methods.

Mixed research consists of using both quantitative and qualitative approaches while conducting a study of some sort. Believers in this research argue that this is the best method to better understand the research problem. But formulating the right mixed research questions is hard, since the questions should not only be quantitatively or qualitatively formulated, and so the paper presents some guidelines for how this is done.

While reading these texts I learned differences in using quantitative and qualitative methods in research. I was pretty confident about what they meant before hand but now I have a better understanding of when to use them (at least when it comes to studies regarding online learning environment).