Description of my Research

For more information, here are my papers and presentations.

The focus of my research is online learning environments. There are many key questions to be answered about these environments and my work focuses on the following. What I want to know is:

How do the affordances and constraints of the tools and instructional strategies in online learning environments determine how and what students learn?

My work over the past few years has been toward addressing this question. There are three key components related to this question that interest me:

  1. instructional content and nature of existing online instructional resources
  2. online instructor variables (preparation, presence, teaching styles, design skills, etc.)
  3. emerging instructional tools and instructional strategies

As part of this effort, I'm working to determine the most effective implementations of online learning environments. I am studying the variables involved in online instruction and the performance of online instructors. I'm studying emerging tools and methods currently being implemented in online learning environments.

A key to this effort is my analysis of current and emerging online learning resources. This work has led to our classification system (Martindale, Cates, and Qian) for online educational resources. This includes analyzing the functions, instructional properties, and components of these resources.

I'm also interested in combinations of emerging tools and methods for online learning environments. Tools such as weblogs, wikis, and social software have potential to contribute towards effective learning in online environments.