About a month ago, our lead researchers Michael Barbour and Randy LaBonte published an article in the International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education entitled “Sense of Irony or Perfect Timing: Examining the Research Supporting Proposed e-Learning Changes in Ontario.” About two weeks ago, the authors sat down to chat about the article on In Conversation with Stephen Hurley. Today, we are announcing that Michael Barbour and Randy LaBonte will be the guests for the next Canadian Initiative for Distance Education Research (CIDER) webinar.
January 22, 2020
11:00am (MT)
Michael K. Barbour, Touro University California
Randy LaBonte, Canadian eLearning Network (CANeLearn)
Only weeks before the 2019 annual meeting of the American Education Research Association (AERA) was held in Toronto, Ontario, the provincial government announced a major reform of education for that province entitled Education that Works for You—Modernizing Classrooms. From an e-learning perspective the proposal called for a centralization of e-learning, a graduation requirement of four e-learning courses, and increasing the class size limit for e-learning courses to 35 students. The AERA call for submissions for the 2020 meeting issued a challenge for scholars to ‘connect with organizational leaders to examine collaboratively continuing educational problems… [and] programmatically engaging with educational organizations.’ This presentation focuses on a recently published article in the International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education by Michael Barbour and Randy LaBonte, who accepted that challenge and described a collaboration between scholars and a pan-Canadian organization to examine the research behind each of the proposed e-learning changes in Ontario.