RJA #3a: Research Topic Exploration

   I started my research with a simple question,” Is online education better or worse than traditional schools”. I started my search on Google and found an article about a study conducted for the Department of Education in 2006; this article said that according to the study online students performed better in all scenarios. This led me to find the actual report done by Sloan’s for the Dept. of Education. After reading the report I realized that it could be interpreted in several ways so I went looking for a negative connotation to the report and found an article showing the other side of the issue; that the report doesn’t prove anything scientifically because there is just not enough data to back up the findings. I then went back to the search on Google and found an article from degree central listing ten reasons why online classes are better than traditional schools; this led to an article in Money Talks about the affordability of online education.

   I then changed searched engines to Google Scholar and found an interesting scientific study done by the University of North Carolina showing that online students attain better results across the board. I also found a study indicating a huge rise in the number of online students in both K-12 and colleges across the nation. I found several instances of studies showing a very large increase especially in online education for K-12.

   I switched the search engine to Addictomatic and found several articles listing the pros and cons of online education. I also found several articles that talked about the eventual replacement of our traditional schools and how online education is more cost effective than our public school systems.

   Debatepedia had several articles arguing that the cost effectiveness of online education alone is enough to make our Public Schools go the way of the dinosaur. There were also several debates on whether home schooling is better than public schools and whether online college courses are as effective as face to face classes.

   The Yahoo Directory came up with some interesting links related to the same searches that I have been doing including the debate over lack of socialization for homeschooled children and the effectiveness of online education compared to traditional schools

   I plan to do my future searches in the same manner, find a question or keywords and run them through several search engines and hopefully find what I’m looking for. There seems to be plenty of information on the subject of online education for both K-12 and college courses. As I figured, there are pros and cons to both sides of this issue, so it should be easy to not be one sided in my research.