Paradox of time in research on educational technology

Abstract

Though the concept of time is fuzzily defined in education, it embraces many key teaching and learning aspects of the educational situation from scheduling (at the macro, meso, and micro level) through certification (i.e., credit requirements). It is also one of the determining factors within institutions for distance learning where education is almost always time and place independent and where learners and/or institutions make use of online and/or e-learning. Strangely, while these temporal aspects of teaching and learning are extremely important, the time-factor has not received much attention in educational research. This is especially strange since “lack of time” and “out of sync” are two of the most common complaints heard from learners in online educational settings. Thus, educational practice misses adequate research on an important aspect that can improve education/learning in general and online/e-learning in particular. To better understand how research deals with “time” as a factor in learning and education, a systematic literature analysis of articles relating to “time” was carried out in a high-impact SSCI journal on education and educational technology. A total of 966 articles across a period of 11 years was analyzed for the presence of “time” as a factor in the research published. The most important result of this literature analysis was that “time” played almost no role as a variable in research on education and educational technology.