Online Learning

Past Projects and Other Research:

The Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities (a joint effort of KU Life Span Institute Centers), was created to address learner variability by conducting research to make online learning more accessible, engaging, and effective for students with disabilities, for whom traditional forms of education were only moderately successful and the precipitous growth in online instruction threatened to exclude.  

The KU e-Learning Research Collaborative (a joint effort with KU's Information and Telecommunication Technology Center) was created to explore new uses of technology to enhance learning environments that met the educational and training needs of society.  This involves the study, development, and research of new designs, principle, practices, tools and policies that contribute to the pedagogy of eLearning.

Researchers at the Center for Research on Learning investigated Flipped & Blended Instructional Strategies including designing Blended Learning Model professional development courses to help teachers effectively and efficiently transform their classrooms. Funding from the Oak Foundation enabled them to conduct observations, as well as interviews with students, teachers, and administrators to better inform this development.  The original Blended Instructional Design (BID) course was created to personalize learning for ALL students. The course was organized to provide efficient professional development in three domains: 1) Identify, 2) Design, and 3) Implement.  Teachers were provided with short 2-3 minutes instructional videos providing descriptions, and models to identify critical content, vocabulary, concepts, virtual and physical materials, assessments, as well as, identify specific student learning needs to personalize instruction and practice/application activities and projects.  Once the information was gathered in the identify phase, teachers immediately applied the information to design their virtual, digital and physical instruction and activities/projects.  Finally, the BID course provided descriptive models of how to transition to a blended learning classroom environment.  Teachers were informed on self-coaching, developing and maintaining partnerships with parents and support personnel. A variety of resources for locating pre-made instructional videos and tools for creating instructional videos, digital tools that support content practice, and supporting documents to use with the online course were provided to enhance the individual learning needs of teachers.