Building on Valerie Irvine's post,
On the notion of topics - I'm actually somewhat interested in e-learning acceptance/adoption. I know we have a lot of studies that examine the question of learning or how learners learn or communities of learners interact, but when I'm often pulled into senior management meetings where the question on the table is "why is our uptake so low?" - I'm curious about the determinants.
I imagine many of us are also at this point in the journey, with lots of great examples in our institutions of the "No Significant Difference Phenomenon" http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. In fact,we are enthusiasts who would like to propose that with the advent and adoption of social software, we are beyond justifying e-learning and are instead at forefront of creating connected learning communities. That said, and quoting Paul Stacey,
A vast volume of e-learning research is being done around the world. What we need is not necessarily more research, the global e-learning research pipe is already gushing out results. What is needed is an analysis and sifting through of the findings with an eye to converting them into practice.
So I propose one of our research/practice topics be focused on policy and cultural issues of adoption/diffusion of technology-enabled learning (distance, online and blended models) in educational institutions (both K-12 and higher ed).
This would give us focus to understand better how to move what has transpired in technology and pedagogy in the past decade into improved understanding and tactics regarding organizational change which is now necessary if we are to move our experiments of the past 10-15 years into wide-scale acceptance. We now need to scaffold what we know works in e-learning from
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the learner engagement perspective, and
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e-infrastructure elements
into solid arguments for informing institutional strategy.
This will involve policy, economic and access models since all this great stuff about learners "co-constructing knowledge" is often overlooked in senior administrative circles.
So let's just call this the "Adoption/Diffusion" thread and see what we might do vis-a-vis research in this arena.