Annual Conference, Lisbon
Tim Seifert, Bruce Sheppard and Ann Marie Vaughn, all from Memorial University, Canada: “Examinig the Effectiveness of Distance Education: Results from Multi-Level Modelling”
Laudatio
In the jurys judgment, in accordance with the six criteria published in the EDEN conference program, the paper selected for the Best Research Paper Award is:
Examining the effectiveness of distance education: Results from multi-level modelling by T. Seifert, B. Sheppard, A.M. Vaughn, Memorial University, Canada
Whereas for many years researchers have focused on effectiveness of distance education in comparison with conventional education, the focus has been on the average effectiveness of learning in the one method compared with the other. The result has invariably been, as we all know, that there are no significant differences. The question addressed in this research is what are the difference among the learners within each group. This is a question that has been addressed to some extent in conventional education, and by introducing it to the distance education community the authors of this paper have made a valuable contribution.
The jury considered the question to be creative and important, the methodology to be sound. With this as with all other papers, the jury felt that research papers submitted to the EDEN conferences should give more attention to explaining the rationale for their research question in the references to the literature in the field of distance education.
Members of the Jury
- Michael Graham Moore, Chair of the Jury, Professor of Education, Pennsylvania State University, United States;
- António Moreira Teixeira, Prorector Innovation, Universidade Aberta, Portugal;
- Andrea Kárpáti, Head of MULTIPED Centre for Multimedia and Educational Technology at Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary;
- Ulrich Bernath & Wolfgang Fichten, Trustees and Directors of the U.B. Foundation, Germany.