Paradox of time in research on educational technology

Abstract

Though the concept of time is fuzzily defined in education, it embraces many key teaching and learning aspects of the educational situation from scheduling (at the macro, meso, and micro level) through certification (i.e., credit requirements). It is also one of the determining factors within institutions for distance learning where education is almost always time and place independent and where learners and/or institutions make use of online and/or e-learning. Strangely, while these temporal aspects of teaching and learning are extremely important, the time-factor has not received much attention in educational research. This is especially strange since ''lack of time'' and ''out of sync'' are two of the most common complaints heard from learners in online educational settings. Thus, educational practice misses adequate research on an important aspect that can improve education/learning in general and online/e-learning in particular. To better understand how research deals with ''time'' as a factor in learning and education, a systematic literature analysis of articles relating to ''time'' was carried out in a high-impact SSCI journal on education and educational technology. A total of 966 articles across a period of 11 years was analyzed for the presence of ''time'' as a factor in the research published. The most important result of this literature analysis was that ''time'' played almost no role as a variable in research on education and educational technology.

The role of temporal patterns in students' behavior for predicting course performance: A comparison of two blended learning courses

“…With our analyses, we have moved from aggregate course‐level measures to weekly measures of student activity. As Barbera et al () suggest, temporal analyses could be looked into even more closely with more fine‐grained levels of analysis, for example by taking each event students engage in as the unit of analysis instead of variables defined at the student level. Another direction for future research is to further delve into theoretical explanations for our findings, in particular to explain what factors contribute to students changing or adapting their study strategies in blended courses.…”

“…A first possible explanation is that often, temporal patterns of student activity are not taken into account, for example, the sequence and timing of student activity (Barbera, Gros, & Kirschner, 2014). When analyzing information on the level of the whole course, temporal information is lost (Barbera et al, 2014), which leads to a loss of in-depth insights about differences between students or about the role of fluctuations in activity.…”

“…A first possible explanation is that often, temporal patterns of student activity are not taken into account, for example, the sequence and timing of student activity (Barbera, Gros, & Kirschner, 2014). When analyzing information on the level of the whole course, temporal information is lost (Barbera et al, 2014), which leads to a loss of in-depth insights about differences between students or about the role of fluctuations in activity. The predictive value of data about student activity may thus be enhanced when considering either the order in which students engage in activities or the timing of engaging in activities (Greiff, Scherer, & Kirschner, 2017).…”

Time for Change: Why Learning Analytics Needs Temporal Analysis

“…However, the details of how processes are expected to unfold over time are rarely well conceptualised. As a result, temporal constructs are underspecified and those that do exist are generally quite simple (Littleton, 1999;Mercer, 2008;Mercer & Littleton, 2007;Barbera, Gros, & Kirschner, 2014). For example, the construct of distributed practice is temporal in that it refers to events over time, indicating that learning occurs better when the same amount of practice (or studying) is spaced out over time than if it is compressed into a short period.…”

Networked Learning

“…Some use the terms more or less systematically (Dysthe and Engelsen 2011 ;, but many remain theoretically underdeveloped and simply associate the mesolevel with institutions and infrastructures and provide little further development of the idea of levels (Selwyn 2010. There are others who apply meso simply to indicate a middle ground between two ends of an arbitrary scale, for example using micro to indicate student activity, meso for curricular activity and macro for organisational activity (Barbera et al 2014 ;Collis 2002 ). In this section of the chapter I will try to amplify the meaning of these terms and to engage with some of the criticisms that have been applied to the use of levels and scalar thinking in the way I propose.…”