A Development Research Agenda for Online Collaborative learning.

A Development Research Agenda for Online Collaborative learning.

The goal of this article was to propose guidelines for an online collaborative learning research. These guidelines were divided to three steps:
- Critique the state-of-the-art of educational research.
- Describe an application of “development research” to teacher education.
- Encourage new thinking about how we use technology in the educational research.
In the beginning, they discussed the reality of online collaborative learning and the problems that faced this discipline.
However, Most educational research has little impact on practitioners and yields few discernable benefits. This is lead to some problems in the development research and using computer mediated communication and e-learning channels in the education field. According to this article, I can summarize these problems in four points:
- Educational researchers tend to promote thinking of online course design as a process of replicate traditional classroom. .
- Failure to get prompt feedback from instructors, and persistent technical problems.
- The short time for the faculty members to create completely different designs for online course.
- Qualitative research yields little that can be generalized beyond the classrooms in which it is conducted.
Moreover, they stated (the reseachers) that educational technology researchers are not doing much better than other educational researchers. For this group, the major conclusion was: “Clearly, the benefits gained from the use of media technology in learning scenarios appear to be very limited and not in keeping with the generally euphoric reaction to this technology in the professional arena.”
The need for new research:
There are new strategies for conducting “development research” that can improve our research so that it can become a socially responsible enterprise. Moreover, many researchers fail to distinguish between research goals and methods.
Education Technology Research goals are:
- Focus on explaining phenomena through logical analysis and synthesis of principles and results from other studies.
- Focus on determining how education works by testing hypotheses related to theories of learning, teaching, performance, etc.
- Focus on determining how education works by describing and interpreting phenomena related to learning, teaching, performance, etc.
- Focus on dual objectives of developing creative approaches to solving problems and constructing reusable design principles.
Development Research Strategies:
- Define a pedagogical outcome and create learning environments that address it.
- Emphasize content and pedagogy rather than technology.
- Give special attention to supporting human interactions.
- Modify learning environments until outcome is reached.


In conclusion, educational technologists should pursue development research that integrates the desire to solve problems with the search for knowledge.
It is not a lack of sufficient research guiding implementation of learning setting, but that instructional designers and instructors often fail to apply the results of existing research to the design of today’s online collaborative learning environments. Moreover, many instructors need educational technology researchers to work with them side-by-side to address the challenge of developing powerful collaborative online learning environments.