The Online Learning Consortium publishes a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, Online Learning (OLJ), four times per year. We just published our final issue of 2019 and are excited to share the 378 pages of original research it contains with the OLC community. This issue of OLJ contains a collection of articles from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Online Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group (OTL SIG).
Each year the AERA annual meeting attracts thousands of students, teachers, and researchers to its conference to understand how to improve education through the design, implementation, and dissemination of rigorous educational research. For the past four years the AERA OTL SIG has assisted OLC with the call for papers and peer-review for this special issue.
At the 2019 annual meeting, the OTL SIG received 145 proposals from which 66 were selected to present. The 11 articles in this special issue report on the research findings stemming from a select group of those proposals. It includes several articles concerned with online educational quality in a variety of settings and from both instructor and student perspectives. Instructor perceptions of the development of community and faculty mentoring are also explored, and one paper examines what the instructors of award winning courses believe makes them award winning. There are also several articles concerned with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). We are also pleased to have the 2019 best paper recipient among the articles collected here.
This issue of OLJ also contains a section with eight papers from our regular submission process. These papers reflect a wide range of themes, research questions, and methods. This collection of studies advances our understanding of instructional quality, K-12 online learning, degree completion, doctoral education, and professional development in online educational settings.
We invite you to read and share this issue with colleagues and to consider submitting your own original work to Online Learning! https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/index