Virtual Design Based Research

Abstract Instructional materials for the online course may be designed with rich multimedia content and innovative approaches. Student engagement with these materials is unseen and left to be inferred. Design based research is an approach used to study intervention in the context of an authentic classroom. It can be applied to the online course to study the impact of instructional design decisions and the effectiveness of multimedia integration. The technology used to support the online course can be used to collect usage data and participant evaluations. Introduction Online instruction can seem like an experience in teaching to the great void. Course content and assignments are designed, developed, and posted online for unseen students who are out there somewhere in cyberspace. An instructor may devote long hours crafting multimedia rich course content only to wonder if students are using and benefiting from those materials. Student engagement with course content can be a mystery even in traditional face to face classrooms. One of the benefits of online instruction is that the course materials are posted on Web servers or course management systems and usage tracking is possible. In a traditional course it is difficult to determine if a student picks up a textbook to read it, but in the online course the mouse click to open the Web page containing an online reading assignment or multimedia presentation can be recorded. Additional data can be collected in the online course through anonymous online evaluation surveys. Data can be imported directly into spreadsheets or databases thus eliminating the need to transfer information from paper survey instruments. The usage and evaluation data can be analyzed by the online instructor to improve course design in a manner consistent with existing instructional design models (Dick, Carey, & Carey, 2005; Gustafson & Branch, 2007). The formative and summative evaluations used as part of the instructional design process are valuable for revision of specific designs created for defined groups of learners. A shift toward a research oriented focus for instructional design is necessary in order to move into the broader scope of learning theory. Instructional Engineering for Online Learning Instructional design is oriented toward the practical goal of developing effective teaching and training solutions. A transition can readily be made from instructional design to an instructional engineering approach by changing the emphasis to one of design centered research. The term instructional engineering is one possible name for the partnership between instructional design and research. This idea was suggested by Brown (1992) when describing how she engineered innovative educational environments while simultaneously conducting experimental studies to learn how they functioned in an authentic classroom. The term design experiment has been used by Brown and others when discussing the strategy of designing an instructional intervention to be tested through research in an authentic classroom context (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1999). Alternative names for the methodology include design research (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004; Edelson, 2002), and design based research (Barab & Squire, 2004; The Design-Based Research Collective [TDBRC], 2003). These terms are often used interchangeably. An instructional engineering approach can be applied to the design and study of virtual learning environments. From this perspective the online course is treated like a product to be designed and tested through a design based research methodology. This process has been described as being similar to product design engineering (Zaritsky, Kelly, Flowers, Rogers, & O'Neill, 2003). The instructional engineering process might begin with conceptualization of the product (i.e. online course) based on relevant overarching theory. This would be followed by design and development of a prototype. …