Yesterday, after I highlighted Martin Weller’s excellent post on supporting distance/online students, Martin sent me a link to his recent paper titled, “Mapping the Open Education Landscape: Citation Network Analysis of Historical Open and Distance Education Research”.
Thanks! On that disconnect between online learning & distance Ed research have you read our paper that explores this out through citation analysis? https://t.co/PtaWkvb9VL
— Martin Weller (@mweller) March 30, 2019
Here’s the reference:
Weller, M., Jordan, K., DeVries, I., & Rolfe, V. (2018). Mapping the open education landscape: citation network analysis of historical open and distance education research. Open Praxis, 10(2), 109-126. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.2.822
Through citation analysis, the paper connects various strands of research starting in the 1970s. As I noted yesterday, one of my great frustrations is the lack of connection between online learning and the gigantic body of research and experience we have with distance education. This disconnect across time is reflected in their analysis:
“Distance education morphed into e-learning literature during much of the 1980s and 1990s. The initiation of the OER movement since 2002 has also coincided with open access as a field of interest. The rise of web 2.0 and social media in the late 2000s led to research relating to academic use of these tools. Social media, OER and open access can be seen as precursors to MOOCs and open practice respectively. Open education in schools has seen different periods of interest, but remained largely distinct from the others. Each of these practices might make reference to its precursor movement, but rarely beyond that.”
Thank you for the link to the article! I’ve already shared it with a student working on an open ed literature review. With hope, armed with this analysis, we can help connect those peaks 🙂