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In the summer of 2020, the Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that gathered educational researchers from around the world who were curious about the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. After all, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most online education was asynchronous. How important were all those Zoom meetings for student learning, really? 

 Today on the podcast, I welcome three members of that research group who are presenting their findings at the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference hosted by UPCEA, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My guests are Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, director of the Ecampus research unit at Oregon State; Enoch Park, senior instructional designer and online learning specialist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

These three represent a group that conducted an extensive meta-analysis of the existing literature about online learning, looking for studies that examined the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. Spoiler alert: They didn’t find much! So if you’re looking for an answer to this big question about synchronous instructor presence, you won’t hear it. But we do have a great conversation about the question itself, their research methods, and what advice they have for others engaged in educational research. 

Episode Resources:

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/staff/bio/dellostm.htm

Enoch Park, https://professional.charlotte.edu/directory/enoch-park

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidija-krebs-lazendic-3a4a8323/?originalSubdomain=au 

Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/ 

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