Theme 3

For this week’s theme we have read two texts. The first one was “Mixed Research and Online Learning: Strategies for Improvement” by Lowenthal & Leech and the second one was “Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment” by Cleveland-Innes & Campbell. Both texts relate to each other since they both are about the topic “online learning”.

Mixed Research and Online Learning: Strategies for Improvement
In this text they introduce the term “mixed research”. Mixed research is what you get when you mix quantitative research with qualitative research. Quantitative research could be the data you get from for example asking the question “how good was this movie on a scale from 1-10?” whereas quantitative research could be the data you get from asking “what makes this movie that good?”. The authors point out that it is important to have in mind that mixed research should only be called that if there are a mix of sampling, methods, data and analysis for the two research types. If there are a mix of all these it could be called “fully mixed”, otherwise the research should be called partially mixed. Mix research is a quite new model, and the authors say that this method will become more popular in the future, and because of that, the overall quality of research on online learning will be better in the future. I think that mixed research will have a bright future. I that that it is always good to combine the best parts from different areas, what ever it might be, in order to achieve a better understanding of something and to better reach your goal. But on the other hand you need to, more or less, master both quantitative research and qualitative research in order to be able to use mixed research, it is not enough to do well in one of those.

Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment
This text is about emotions in online learning and it tries to find out if emotions can exist in an online learning environment, and if that is the case, how to best make use of them. The method used in this paper is data collection and questionnaires that were handed out to 217 students. So you can say that this is a quantitative method and they analysed the data through statistical and quantitative analysis.

I think it is interesting with emotions in online learning. The conclusion of the study was that it exists emotions in online learning and you need to be careful about how you make use of that since it can have both positive and negative effects. If students are not feeling that well when they are studying, and the online learning environment knows about that, then the results of their studies might not be that beneficial. So you can say that the feelings might “boost” the outcome of a study session, and it can be of both positive and negative matter.