Researching e-learning
Posted on 22 June 2004
The Economic and Social Research Council has given funds to run six international research seminars with input from academic colleagues in the USA and Canada both in person, and appropriately, via electronic means.
The seminars will be held at universities which are members of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN). Professor Richard Andrews and his team in the Department of Educational Studies have already discovered that there is a lack of good-quality evidence about the effect of e-learning on literacy education in schools, and that any evaluation has taken a short-term approach.
Professor Andrews said: "Technological advances appear to have driven developments in schools. It's time to take stock of e-learning at the higher education level, looking at the nature of learning, the extent and nature of the 'e-learning communities', and how these compare to conventional practices."
Starting with York, one seminar will be held at each of the other five WUN partner universities in the UK (Bristol, Southampton, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield), over a two-year period.
The first event will be on 7 December in York and the keynote international speaker will be Professor Carol Chapelle of Iowa State University.
Professor Andrews plans that the research seminar programme will yield an edited, landmark book for an international audience, plus the electronic dissemination of investigations and articles to key journals in the field.
Notes to editors:
- Existing WUN projects in this area include: the first United Kingdom eUniversity online Masters programme in Public Policy (launched by York); the E-Languages project (led by Southampton); the E-China project (coordinated by Manchester); the Research Centre in E-Learning (Southampton and Manchester); and close association with the Sloan-C conferences on Asynchronous Learning Networks (Sloan Foundation, USA).
- Professor Carol Chapelle is editor of TESOL Quarterly, a leading research journal, and author of Computer Applications in second Language Acquisition: foundations for teaching, testing and research (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and English Language Learning and Technology: lectures on applied linguistics in the age of information and communication technology (John Benjamins, 2003).