36
Florence Martin and Beth Oyarzun
Use of online and blended learning continues to grow in higher education. As of 2015, approximately 70% of degree- granting institutions have some online offerings (Allen & Seaman, 2015). Research in online learning has been conducted at micro and macro levels. Micro level research has been conducted at the course or individual case study level, investigating variables such as effective instructional strategies or demographic profiles of successful learners in these environments. Macro level research has been conducted at the national or global levels, investigating access to education via free online courses such as Massively Open Online Courses, otherwise known as MOOCs, and examining global standards for online learning.
This chapter explores several research trends in order to assess the state of online learning and identify opportunities for future research. In order to better understand the research trends, definitions are presented first followed by quality standards for online learning courses, and programs developed by professional organizations are summarized. Student, faculty, and administrator perceptions of online learning are reviewed in addition to best practices in design and implementation in online learning. Best practices regarding faculty and learner support are also discussed. Finally, the chapter concludes with a list of academic journals dedicated to online learning research, and a review of trends in online learning to watch.
Definitions of Delivery Methods
In this section, we briefly define the various terms involved with online delivery methods.
Table 1. Definition of Online Delivery Methods
| Asynchronous online learning | A course where most of the content is delivered online and students can participate in the online course from anywhere at anytime. There are no real time online or face-to-face meetings. |
| Synchronous online learning | A course where most of the content is delivered online and students can participate in courses from anywhere. There are real time online meetings and students login from anywhere but at the same time to participate in the course. |
| MOOC | These are Massive Open Online Courses where an unlimited number of students can access the open source content free of cost. |
| Blended/Hybrid | A course with a combination of face-to-face and asynchronously online delivery with a substantial portion of the course delivered online. |
| Blended Synchronous | A combination of face-to-face and synchronously online students in the course. |
| Multi-Modal | A combination of synchronous and asynchronous online learning in the course. |
Distance education and online learning are terms that are often used interchangeably. However, online learning and its components are encompassed within distance education, which contains two components that are not representative of online learning: correspondence courses and satellite campuses. Figure 1 is a visual representation of t