Kearsley gives several topics of research for online education. Those topics include: student achievement, school-level impact, class interaction, virtual conferences, and learning communities. He talks about how technology has an effect on all of these topics and how we can research them in order to determine where the future of technology and online education is going. But it’s not just technology that we have to research. We also need to research how the class is being taught and evaluate who the course is being taught by. There are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to online education.

Even though I don’t really speak in the chats I think they are important. They keep the class connected as a whole and allow a sense of being involved in a class. With online education it is hard to know the opinions of others, and the chats let other classmates know how their peers feel about certain topics and give them better insight to the topics they are unsure about.

I found this article on the OLDaily blog and thought that it was interesting (http://www.universityaffairs.ca/2008/11/03/how-technology-is-transforming-the-lecture.aspx). In this article, a professor at York University makes web videos as lectures; however, his students gave him feedback on the lectures and told him that they did not like them. So he started doing some more research and looked into things like the students’ attention span and what they liked. After his research he decided to break his lecture into parts and allow “funny” breaks in between.

I think this would work for a lot of online courses. Teachers can get feedback from students as to what they liked and didn’t like and teachers could adapt to what the students have suggested or make improvements based on their suggestions.