Third theme...

Until recently, there were not many researches conducted, about people’s emotional response when entering an online environment. But Cleveland-Innes & Campbell’s research paper shed light on this topic. According to them, emotions are always present in any kind of learning environment and have a radical role in students’ learning process. Therefore, emotions will be present in an online learning environment too. Furthermore the researchers, through some empirical data, get to the conclusion that emotional presence may contain a primary element in online communities of inquiry as well.

For their study, they interviewed 217 students and they collected the out coming data using a modified Community of Inquiry instrument. This instrument included past information about cognitive, social and teaching presence, but also new measures about an emotional presence.

Their research consists of two main phases. During the first, they are examining the interviewee students’ responses and through this they get to confirm an emotion existence in online learning environments. After that, comes the phase number two. Now the authors examine the students through indications of presence and get to confirm that online students do obtain emotions in addition to the emotions obtained by social presence.

 Over and above that, according to another research paper conducted by Lowenthal & Leech, researchers until recently were separated into two and very distinct types. So in the one hand were the quantitative researchers (positivists) and in the other hand were the qualitative (constructivists). However, recently there were some discussions about the formation of one additional group, this of the mixed researchers (pragmatists). Scientists belonging to this last group support that in order to obtain results of higher quality in a scientific research, we have to apply both qualitative and quantitative methods (mixed research).

Today, the majority of research about online learning is conducted with an application of either quantitative or qualitative methods (mono-method). However, if researchers want to ameliorate their search results on this topic, have to abandon the mono-method and adopt the mixed research. So as the concept of mixed methods is newly formed, there is very little research about online learning conducted in this new way. And even this existing one is considered of low quality as it suffers from a high number of problems.

In order to avoid these problems, Collins, Onwuegbuzie and Sutton (2006) formulated 13 steps that are to assist researchers in conducting a mixed research study, from start to finish. These specific steps, as they are presented in their paper, are the following:

“1) determining the goal of the study, 2) formulating the research objective, 3) determining the research/mixing rationale, 4) determining the research/mixing purpose, 5) determining the research question(s), 6) selecting the sample design, 7) selecting the mixed research design, 8) collecting the data, 9) analyzing the data, 10) validiating/legitimating the data, 11) interpreting the data, 12) writing the mixed research report, and 13) reformulating the research question(s)”

Moreover, they formulated seven specific stages about the step 9; the data analysis:

“1) Data reduction, 2) data display, 3) data transformation, 4) data correlation, 5) data consolidation, 6) data comparison and 7) data integration”

References:

Collins, K. M. T., Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Sutton, I. L. (2006). “A model incorporating the rationale and purpose for conducting mixed methods research in special education and beyond”. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 4, 67-100.