Alexis Guethler and Colleagues from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) Publish Preliminary Results of Scoping Review on Online Learning Practices with Adults.
School of Social Work IDEA team member Alexis Guethler along with Shannon Tucker, Assistant Dean of Instructional Design and Technology, Pharmacy, and colleaguesthe Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), recently published the preliminary results of a scoping review on online learning practices with adults. They presented their process for inter-institutional collaboration in October.
Additionally, Alexis presented the results of her dissertation research on supporting online learners with a self-regulation intervention with her advisor Bill Sadera of Towson
Chapter Published in Handbook of Research in Online Learning: Fensie, A., Guethler, A., Bellnier, K., Krieger, M., Tucker, S., Rogowski, A., Flowers, S., Fortune, C. K., Xu, F., Jamison, F., & Stidham, S. (2024). "Chapter 2: The Study of Adult Learners in Distance Education: Insights and Implications for Online Learning Research Cultivated during a Scoping Review". In Handbook of Research in Online Learning. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004702813_002
Abstract: This chapter reflects on a scoping review of how researchers study how adults learn in distance education, including higher education and continuing education. In this chapter, we provide context for the study of this topic, describe the scoping review methodology, and explain how our research team used this methodology. We then chronicle our research process to illustrate the iterative nature of scoping reviews and highlight essential discoveries. Next, we share some preliminary findings on methods used to study adult learning processes in distance education, which are primarily quantitative or unspecified. Finally, we share our recommendations for conducting research in online learning based on what we saw in our analysis of several thousand records. These include capturing key student elements in the abstract, being explicit with definitions, constructs, population, and context, using measures of learning beyond student perceptions, developing and implementing shared measures of learning, and being clear with connections to theory.
Process Presentation Title: Three’s Company, Four’s a Crowd, and Twenty is Serendipity: Collaborative Research through Grace without Guilt
More than twenty researchers from colleges and universities around the world came together to work on a scoping review of the literature on adult learning in distance education. While many people are excited about our findings, we often receive questions about how we have managed to work successfully on a long-term project with so many people from different backgrounds and locations. Our “secret sauce” is the intentionality and openness of the process that included developing a research protocol that was iteratively updated as the team worked collaboratively through the stages of a scoping review: search for potential records, several rounds of abstract reviews, criteria revision, full text reviews, data extraction, and analysis.