Introduction
Online Learning & Education Research Program (OLERP) was originally established in 2018 by Dr. Anna Ni and Professor Monty Van Wart, with the express goal of "Making CSU a World-class Best Practice Leader in Equity Online Education". It began as a JHB College of Business and Public Administration research group, and later expanded to a fully integrated university research team involving all colleges.
Online Learning & Education Research Team Mission and Values Statements
Mission and Purposes of the team:
- To improve the quality of online teaching at CSUSB, and internationally.
- To improve our own personal online teaching skills and abilities.
- To conduct both quantitative and qualitative research that can be published at various levels, from white papers to A-level journals.
- To sustain an on-going agenda of parallel projects in order to build up nationally-recognized thought leadership in online teaching quality.
Values of the Team:
- To provide the core team members with mutual support and to make significant contributions as individuals to the team.
- To provide research support for non-core team members as much as possible and appropriate.
- To rotate responsibilities and contributions, as well as authorship recognition, in pragmatic and professional ways.
- To be polite but candid with core team members. To allow friendly debates within the context of the team.
Research Agenda
One of the strongest findings in all of the social sciences is that best-practice identification and dissemination is among the most effective strategies for improving organizational practices. In the CSU teaching setting, utilization of best practices leads to higher levels of learning achievement, interest, and passing rates.
Online learning provides great opportunities because of its flexibility for students and has made great strides in technology. Nonetheless, the pandemic laid bare the challenges for many CSU students who frequently found much of the online learning environment dull, unresponsive, and/or ineffective. These challenges were much exacerbated in many disciples which had lagged others in online education because of their unique needs, requirements of high standards, or the challenges of dealing with students taking GE who may be less motivated by the course content. On top of this, there are heightened challenges for students who are learning online and who are also culturally marginalized, have external demands such as work and family obligations, lack traditions of college-going family members, etc. Even as students have returned to face-to-face classrooms, they earnestly want the flexibility of online learning--if only the current weaknesses in many online courses could be mitigated.
Our goal is simple: investigate the discipline-specific best practices and propagate those best practices in our university and through our research agenda.
To date, the team has focused on a variety of online learning topics via different methods. Those subtopics (and the number of papers published) include:
- Comprehensive literature overviews and overarching theory-driven research (five papers)
- Disciplinary-specific student online learning preferences (non-STEM) (four papers)
- Online education, STEM, and the importance of disciplinary differences (three papers)
- Faculty online teaching opinions and preferences (three papers)
- Online education and equity (two papers)
- Online education and accreditation issues (one paper)
Special Focus on Equity
The great irony of online education in higher education is that URM students need more flexibility to deal with frequently heavy work schedules and family commitments, yet research has shown that they do more poorly in online courses than they would do in traditional courses when compared to their non-URM counterparts. Any improvement in the quality of online courses disproportionately helps students who are weaker, culturally diverse, and/or financially more insecure.
In addition, various studies suggest that students from under-represented backgrounds learn differently in the online classroom, and instructors of online courses often fail to recognize and address the cultural diversity of their learners in the online environment, leading to differential learning challenges. Meanwhile, the availability of online courses continues to increase with limited research exploring how different strategies impact student outcomes as it relates to DEI. However, as the pandemic experience has illuminated this issue of online learning, further attention is needed to better address the range of learning challenges among under-represented minority students.
For example, the research team has found that based on a study of over 1,500 CSUSB students, Hispanic students want a warmer, less competitive, and more supportive environment than non-Hispanic students. In another study, the p research team found a significant difference between URM students and non-URM students. URM students expect to work harder and get poorer grades than non-URM students.