The OECD report

Well, this reading (OECD report) was very interesting. I enjoyed this, as it seemed more relevant to my educational setting, used research methods and commentary styles with which I am more familiar and I could also envisage how some of the report may feed forward to researching and reporting on my own practice; I must earmark time to read the full report, though.
The researchers wanted to look at how learning was 'living up to' its historical claims. This was an investigation into a wide range of variables, such as who uses this, what methods are used, what the cost and pricing implications are; as well as considering both the teaching and the learning perspective.
The content of the overall report was clearly stated, as was the intention of the two studies.
The limitations stated were namely:
- the difficulty in generalising quslitiative data across such a diverse spread of groups and variables; indeed, it '...cannot be said to give a representative overview...' in the OECD group
- likely bias in relation to 'self selection', as respondents who had an interest in elearning would be more likely to respond to the survey anyway
On the last point, though; is this not likely to be true of any research in education? It can often seem as if there is 'too much going on' and we need to be very selctive in what we allocate time and other resouces to.