What have I learned after this week about Quantitative methods and online learning???
During this week, we had the luck to experience the statistics program
SPSS, and hear a very intriguing lecture from Mrs. Martha Cleveland-Innes about
quantitative methods and their application in the research of online learning’s
impact.
SPSS is a statistic program used for statistical analysis. It is a
program with a big audience as it has one big advantage; it is highly user
friendly. Anybody can use it regardless of its background, i.e. scientists,
journalists etc. Its basic functions are statistical analysis, data management
and documentation. I strongly believe that this
first acquaintance with SPSS is to help me a lot with my future master thesis.
Quantitative methods are significant “tools” that lead to a ‘translation’
of things into numbers and these numbers (data) hopefully, can give to the
quantitative researchers a clear image of what is going on. Researchers firstly
get the data and then analyze them. We should also keep in mind that when we
are making a quantitative research on a specific topic, the bigger the sample
the bigger the variation we will have in all the “mess”. But which are the key
prerequisites for doing a quantitative research?? We have to be good at the
conceptualism; create an argument why we do what we want to do. This among other
will be a very helpful tool for the researcher to convince and get a founding! Also, it would be good to state
that if people want to do a research with a more grounded background, then they
should use more mixed research methods; both qualitative and quantitative.
Furthermore, as it is mentioned in the book "The Handbook of
Emergent Technologies in Social Research", internet has change the way
people react with each other, so internet has to change and the way people do
scientific research. In quantitative analyses on online learning, researchers
assign numbers to patterns of behavior, something that is valuable information
for teaching. These analyses have shown that e-learning can be a very emotional
experience for students as internet is a very emotional environment. An online
environment is not ‘teacher presence’ but ‘teaching presence; individual
students feel comfortable to be the teachers too, so they talk and interact with
each other.
Today researchers support that we need some face to face and some online
learning. They cannot say yet which way is better, but hope that one day with
the help of quantitative methods and big enough samples will be able to know
and have proofs on it.
Reference:
Nagy
Hesse-Biber, S. “The Handbook of
Emergent Technologies in Social Research”, OXFORD University Press, USA, 2011.
You mention that the greater the number we have in a quantitative survey, the greater the variation of "the mess" if I interpret "the mess" right can you not solve this by making use of a large randomized research?
SvaraRaderaKaterina, which mode of learning, in your opinion would be most effective in this age: online learning or face to face learning? If you're to have a mixture of both, which of the two do you think should take a bigger percentage of the learning time?
SvaraRadera