måndag 12 november 2012

Reflections vol 3...


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.

2 kommentarer:

  1. 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?

    SvaraRadera
  2. Katerina, 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