Fall 2020 Member Spotlights

Dr. Fei Gao

Research Agenda

My research focuses on investigating how social media supports educators’ professional learning and development, and how to design and support social media-based learning. Currently, I plan to address some interesting questions such as how educators’ participation varies in a social media-supported learning community, and how knowledge is shared and co-constructed within the community over time. Answers to these questions will inform us of ways to support meaningful social media-based learning.

Research Trajectory

I have always been interested in the role that social interaction plays in learning. I was fascinated by the how the emergence of social media and social networking technologies facilitates and intensifies such communication and interaction. In 2011, I started my research on social media by reviewing the research on Twitter-supported learning, and then I conducted a series of studies investigating how social media tools were used to engage people in active and sustained learning. For example, I and my colleague conducted a case study to understand how an informal microblogging-based learning community in China successfully engaged the public in lifelong learning. I also studied a Twitter-supported online professional development community for educators to examine how learning occurs in such communities.

As I learned more about this area of research, I realized that, the majority of research at that time focused on why and how educators used social media for professional development and learning. Few studies examined why some educators were deeply committed to this type of learning while others were not. To better understand the phenomenon, I worked with a colleague and investigated how some key dimensions of online discourses (i.e. cognitive dimension, interactive dimension, and social dimension) influenced educators’ continued participation in a Twitter-based professional learning community. The work provided insights on how to develop specific support mechanisms to encourage educators’ continued participation.

Theories

Lave and Wenger’s (1991) community of practice framework has guided my investigation of how we collectively and actively create knowledge using social media. To help us understand what motivates educators to use Twitter for professional development, I developed a conceptual model of educators’ Twitter adoption based on technology adoption model and related literature. Using structural equation modeling, I examined the relationships among the factors included in the model. The model provides us a better understanding of educators’ social media usage for professional development and has implications for how to motivate educators to participate in social media-supported professional development activities.

Emerging Methodologies

In addition to more traditional methodologies such as discourse analysis, survey and interviews, social network analysis has been used to understand how social learning occurs and is supported within networks. Data mining techniques, such as sentiment and opinion analysis and automated content analysis, have also been used to examine the nature of users’ participation, classify discourses into categories, identify trends and more.

Dr. Albert Ritzhaupt

Research Agenda

My research agenda has largely been shaped by my professional goal: the meaningful integration of information and communication technology (ICT) for the improvement of educational outcomes. This broad goal manifests itself into a few separate, but interrelated research themes that include: 1) effective design, development, utilization, and evaluation of theory-inspired, technology-enhanced learning environments; 2) appropriate teaching practices and instructional strategies for computer and information science education; 3) operationalization and measurement of technology integration in education, particularly focusing on the factors that facilitate and hinder technology integration in formal educational settings; and 4) in more recent history, the study of the competencies of professionals in the broad field of educational technology. My focus is on answering the following four broad research questions:

1. How do we design, develop, implement and evaluate theory-inspired, technology-enhanced learning environments for diverse learners and settings?

2. What are the effective and ineffective teaching practices and instructional strategies used in computer and information science education?

3. How do we operationalize and measure technology integration in formal educational settings, and which factors facilitate or hinder this integration?

4. What are the core competencies of professionals working across contexts in the broad field of educational technology, and how should we develop and validate these competencies?

During the past ten years, my body of scholarship has largely focused on these four questions while balancing the interests of my doctoral students. At heart, I identify myself as a “designer” of research methods, instruments, instructional solutions and materials, and technology-enhanced learning environments. I use a wide variety of research methods to answer my research questions. I employ traditional experimental design research methods for testing many of my instructional designs and innovations in technology-enhanced learning environments. I use classical and modern test theory to establish measurement systems to inform my research and the research of others, using such procedures as exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and more. I have employed literature synthesis and meta-analysis procedures to synthesize across primary studies on complex research questions. I have also used some more sophisticated data analysis procedures for analyzing larger data sets, including multi-level modeling and structural equation modeling techniques. I have also used qualitative techniques such as the constant comparative method, case study method, and phenomenology to answer questions related to deeply understanding situations and experiences.

One recent examples of my current work is a project involving a meta-analysis of the application of gamification to formal educational settings on affective, cognitive, and behavioral learning outcomes. This first part of this work was recently published in the special issue of Educational Technology Research and Development. This project involved members of my lab collaborating on the full process of a meta-analysis from conception and operationalization of gamification in formal educational settings, the selection of keywords, executing the search strategy, filtering to include only appropriate articles, coding of articles based on our taxonomy, extracting the effects size information, and running the statistical models. A second example of my scholarship is a project on the final stages of the design and development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the Coursera platform focused on teaching power and sample size analysis for multilevel and longitudinal research designs. This project stemmed from an NIH grant and has resulted in several pieces about the transformation process of taking a face-to-face workshop and creating a MOOC, and the final stages of a summative evaluation of the MOOC using both traditional methods and learning analytics.

Research Trajectory

I started like many in our field with a passion about the transformative power of technology in education. My doctoral mentor – Dr. Ann E. Barron – provided me ample research opportunities as a doctoral student related to my areas of interest. Over the years, I have developed, refined, and evolved my research agenda to address the ongoing issues and challenges (e.g., digital equity in education) in the field of educational technology and the immediate needs of my graduate students and academic program area I serve. While some of my research areas have remained constant over the years, others have progressed into different avenues based on new research methods I have learned over the years (e.g., meta-analysis) and others have emerged as a necessity to effectively teach and mentor in the constantly changing educational technology program (e.g., professional competencies).

Theories

I do not subscribe to a single theory or method of instruction as my approach has been shaped by many theories, technologies, experiences, and philosophies. I also largely believe that we should draw from a range of theoretical approaches that best suite the context of our research problems. However, I would say that I tend to align my work principles of learning from cognitivism, such as my work extending to the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML). I typically rely on more of an objectivist approach in my scholarship, relying heavily on quantitative methods. With that said, I have drawn from a wide-range of theoretical perspectives from different disciplines, like TPACK, TAM, COI, DoI, and more. I try to include a theoretical or conceptual framework in most of my scholarly articles to connect my approach to existing theories and ideas. As they say, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Emerging Methodologies

By the words “emerging methodologies”, I assume you are asking about methodological approaches to answer our research questions. The best advice I could offer a new, emerging scholar in our field is to learn as much about methodology in all of its forms as possible. Just like media and technology are converging, so too are many of our approaches to scholarship. An example of this would be the recent growth in learning analytics based on machine learning algorithms, and connecting these types of data to more traditional forms like surveys or assessments. The opportunities are endless within our field.