Terry Anderson

Methodologies provide the tools and guidance for their effective employment.

Methodologies employed reflect and affect the mind set of the researcher and the research process.

I think most of us would agree, that no one tool set is the best choice to use in every context and to understand every problem. Nonetheless there may be methodologies that are more (or less) in line with those of a funding source or a political meme.

Should a Pan Canadian Research Agenda recommend (or reflect):

• a particular research approach?
  
• a radically 'neutral' stance?
• or just play down specific approaches claiming value in maximum diversity in the approach recommended.

Your best methodology?

Thanks for all the discussion and texts at the First Elluminate session.

I wanted to start some new threads on various components of a research agenda, and will do so. But I missed other issues in the text window and would welcome additional threads on items that perked your interest - or that you are not sure about.

Start a new thread by Clicking on the begin a new discussion thread button.

Welcome to the Shaping Our Future: Toward a Pan Canadian E-learning Research Agenda online conference. In this post I wanted to overview why I think this is an important topic and our expectations for the conference.

For many years, I have been whining and sniveling about the lack of support and incentive for e-learning research in Canada. As an e-learning researcher, these protests may seem as only self serving, but I really think that Canada is missing out on and blowing our early lead in this increasingly important field. E-Learning has been recognized by many nations as being critical not only for existing formal education systems, but more importantly for lifelong learning, professional development, re-training of immigrants and creating opportunity those who are deprived of access to traditional forms of education and learning.

As our presenters (and especially Grainne Conole) will demonstrate during the conference most countries of the world (developed and developing) have national programs to support and encourage e-learning. Many countries also recognize the value in active research programs that help develop, evaluate, mash, deploy and more quickly and effectively understand the use of e-learning tools and techniques. Unfortunately, Canada has yet to recognize and support specific e-learning initiatives. This is not to say that there is no research or development work going on in Canada, but rather that researchers must compete with all the other disciplines for meager available funds. I am told that this year’s Section 18 of SSHRC standard grant funding (the one that includes education) had an 18% success rate for all applications. Likely very few of the successful funds were focused on e-learning.

In 2005 I hired Dr Tim Buell to create a literature review on large scale or national research agendas. I had intended to follow up on this by actually generating a research agenda through surveys of researchers, policy makers, administrators and learners. But after the paper came out, I got cold feet, thinking that the time wasn’t right and that maybe the activity should be postponed until we felt that it could lead to action on the resulting research agenda. I’m not convinced that the time is right, three years later. But George Siemens twisted my arm, and Sylvia Currie provide the SCOPE conference system, so here we are…..

I hope that the conference will help us all to understand
• What is a research agenda?
• Why we need a pan-Canadian e-learning research agenda in this area,
• what the components of a research agenda are,
• on the third week we will create that agenda on the SCOPE WIkI
• and perhaps the collaborative creation and dissemination of this document will be used by researchers, policy makers and teachers to galvanize and inspire all of us to more effectively use e-learning to improve the lives of all of us.


My thanks to all who have been working behind the scenes to organize and promote this event, to the speakers over the next two weeks and most importantly to you, the delegate for participating and adding your contribution to the event.

I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on the state of Canada’s (or the global) e-learning research agenda, and what you expect and hope to get from our conference.
Over…….

Terry