Online Education -- Research Method Response Initial Essay

Online Education -- Research Method Response

Initial Research Methodology

I relied exclusively on online sources to conduct the research for this project. The first source that I consulted was the database archived on the website maintained by the former print magazine, U.S. News & World Report that ceased its hardcopy print publication last year. I selected that as the starting point for my research because I was aware of the long-term annual series of "Best Colleges in the U.S." And "Best Graduate Schools in the U.S." published by the magazine. It occurred to me that, in the Internet age and with the continually-increasing popularity of online education programs, the magazine would probably have also evaluated the various online options to a traditional "brick-and-mortar" institution of higher learning.

Because the U.S. News & World Report article (Clark, 2009) mentioned the importance of technological systems to the quality and capabilities of online educational programs, I then used the search engine Google and the search terms "online" and "education" and "technology." That search generated the Washington Post article (Overly, 2010). Luckily, that article proved to be directly relevant to my research because it detailed the manner and degree to which both the quality and profitability of online programs of higher education depend directly on the design and functional capabilities of the computer technologies and systems used to maintain those types of programs.

Reviewing the results of that same search, I noticed the Journal of the Association Medical Colleges article (Ruiz, Mintzer, & Leipzig, 2006) and thought that it might be helpful to the analysis to consider how the concept of online education has been incorporated into medical education programs. Because that article is six years old, I would not have relied on it…