2021 Online Learning Research

Welcome back to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) blog, where I share summaries of recent research on active teaching and learning in higher education. As many of us begin another academic year uncertain as to the specific mode of teaching, I would like to share relatively recent research for online learning (i.e., pre 2020 pandemic conditions). Chances are that many of us will be teaching some amount online, so I will include digital learning research in these SoTL summaries.

First, I would like to share a May 2018 Chronicle article entitled, "What 6 Colleges Learned About Improving Their Online Courses" by McMurtrie, who summarized research in the paper, "Making Digital Learning Work Success Strategies from Six Colleges" (participating schools included Arizona State, U of Central Florida, Georgia State, Houston CC, Kentucky CC, Rio Salado CC).

In summary the research found that online learning:

can boost retention, graduation rates and faster time to degree... but, colleges need to develop a variety of delivery models to match students’ needs, and make significant investments in instructional design and student support services (in other words, don’t expect a series of videotaped lectures to work);
creates a more diverse student body; and
draws more older students, women, and Pell Grant recipients;

However, the research also indicated that high-quality digital courses don’t just happen - they require faculty developers, instructional designers, data analysts, multimedia experts, and strong student-support staff with expertise in learning science, course design, and pedagogy/andragogy.

As we create online learning opportunities, many of us will be offering videos, associated with formative feedback loops. We might wonder the best length for videos. Research from Quality Matters on the Most Effective Video Length shares a large-scale study from MIT that used data from seven million video watching sessions, which found that videos should be shorter than six minutes. A study from U of Wisconsin found that students believed the videos helped were best kept to less than 15 minutes.

References

Bailey, A., et al. (2018). Making digital learning work success strategies from six colleges. Retrieved from https://edplus.asu.edu/sites/default/files/BCG-Making-Digital-Learning-Work-Apr-2018%20.pdf

Berg, R. (2014). Leveraging recorded mini-lectures to increase student learning. Online Classroom.

Burch, B. (2020). Video length in online courses: What the research says. Retrieved from https://www.qualitymatters.org/qa-resources/resource-center/articles-resources/research-video-length

Guo, P., Kim, J. & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. SIGCHI Conference Proceedings.