Online Education -- Research Method Response Initial

Online Education -- Research Method Response Initial Research Methodology I relied exclusively on online sources to conduct the research for this project. The first source that I consulted was the database archived on the website maintained by the former print magazine, U.S. News & World Report that ceased its hardcopy print publication last year.

I selected that as the starting point for my research because I was aware of the long-term annual series of "Best Colleges in the U.S." And "Best Graduate Schools in the U.S." published by the magazine. It occurred to me that, in the Internet age and with the continually-increasing popularity of online education programs, the magazine would probably have also evaluated the various online options to a traditional "brick-and-mortar" institution of higher learning. Because the U.S.

News & World Report article (Clark, 2009) mentioned the importance of technological systems to the quality and capabilities of online educational programs, I then used the search engine Google and the search terms "online" and "education" and "technology." That search generated the Washington Post article (Overly, 2010).

Luckily, that article proved to be directly relevant to my research because it detailed the manner and degree to which both the quality and profitability of online programs of higher education depend directly on the design and functional capabilities of the computer technologies and systems used to maintain those types of programs.

Reviewing the results of that same search, I noticed the Journal of the Association Medical Colleges article (Ruiz, Mintzer, & Leipzig, 2006) and thought that it might be helpful to the analysis to consider how the concept of online education has been incorporated into medical education programs.

Because that article is six years old, I would not have relied on it for details about technical issues or descriptions of the functional capacity of online educational technology and systems, because computer technology improves a rate that is much too fast to consider analyses that are six years old. On the other hand, I thought that a more general analysis of online education as a concept would still be useful, particularly in an article published by a peer-reviewed periodical.

The fact that the periodical spans both the medical field and the educational field suggested to me that any such analysis might be highly useful, notwithstanding its relative staleness by virtue of its publications date.

Sources Considered but Rejected There were three reasons that caused me to reject search results: first, those that were not published by professional or peer-reviewed, or mainstream news sources; second, those that were published by insufficiently scholarly sources (such as aol articles without author attribution); and third, those that were published by scholarly sources but that required a fee to view the articles in full text format. Unanticipated Complications During my.