Major Project 1: Annotated Bibliography
- Wendy Bui
- Nov 15, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 24, 2020
Assignment/Project Summary:
The annotated bibliography goes over the sources that I've gathered thus far to support my work in the Major Project 1. For this project, students are required to analyze a minimum of three traditional scholarly sources and at least two non-traditional sources.
For my non-traditional sources, I analyzed an article from a nonprofit institution focused on addressing inequalities locally in Washington D.C. and globally. I also analyzed a Reshaping Education podcast episode where the host and guest discuss how online education, educational engagement, and community affect students.
In each analysis, I cover the source's origin, content, purpose, value, limitation, as well as how the source is relevant to my work.
Reflections and Comments:
I think that this assignment was a good practice piece to go over the skills I learned and developed in high school. Revisiting this skill, I definitely felt like I wasn't as confident in what I was doing. This is especially true when I wrote the first annotated bibliography paragraph on "Unequally disconnected: Access to online learning in the US." That being said, as I kept writing, I was able to re-familiarize myself with the process and I think that I have regained the majority of my knowledge of how to write a good annotated bibliography.
Wendy Bui
Professor Caitlin Postal
ENGL 182K | Multimodal Composition
MP1 Annotated Bibliography
Collis, Victoria and Vegas, Emiliana. “Unequally disconnected: Access to online learning in
the US.” Brookings. The Brookings Institution, 22 Jun. 2020,
disconnected-access-to-online-learning-in-the-us/. Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.
The article, “Unequally disconnected: Access to online learning in the US” is from the Brookings Institution whose mission is to help solve problems that society faces from local to global levels. The purpose of this article is to critically examine the impacts of using online education as the only means to teach students, which is a situation that most, if not all schools are facing at the moment.
More specifically, the article examines the impact of relying solely on remote learning on disadvantaged students through data that the institution has collected and suggests ways to improve the situation to make education more equitable. The source has a lot of value in that it is recent (published in June 2020) and relevant to my own research about the advantages and disadvantages of relying solely on remote learning. I think the source can be limited in that because it’s meant to provide information in a more digestible way (when compared to formal research papers), some of the points that could be elaborated upon are not. The majority of the article seems to be explaining the data that they present from the US Census Bureau, so I think that more analysis from an organization specializing in identifying and helping with solution development would be useful.
Overall, I believe that this source is useful for my own research because it not only gave me recent relevant information about responses to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, it also brings to light some circumstances that I hadn’t considered prior since I was focused on things relating to my own experiences with online education. This source I am considering using when analysing the disadvantages of relying solely on online education (roughly 2nd body paragraph) because it explained the census data clearly enough that it would help to strengthen my argument about the specific disadvantages of online education.
Baid, Ish. "The Role of Community in Learning Online w/ Alberto Arenaza." Reshaping
Education - Higher Ed, Online Education, Bootcamps, ISAs, and More. ep. 7,
open.spotify.com/episode/13ICbA2dKE97dltZxBMMyS?si=GopgS23zTOC0iXkQkFfZjQ.
Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.
This podcast episode is from the Reshaping Education podcast where the host, Ish Baid, invites guests involved in the development of innovative education companies/technologies to discuss the future of education. This particular episode focuses on the community aspect of education both in traditional and online educational spaces and the impact of having a community vs. not having one while learning.
I think that this podcast is valuable because it gives the viewpoints and ideas of two people who are able to reflect on the process of online learning and provide a new perspective to most people: the people shaping certain online education spaces. It is also useful in that the podcast episode was aired relatively recently (May 2020) so they are able to reflect on the past (pre-COVID-19) and present situation as well as making predictions for the future based on their experiences in the field. I think this source is limited because of the format.
While the podcast format makes it very easy to access and understand, this can be an issue if one wants to go back to examine certain topics discussed in the episode because there is no transcript or time stamp for listeners to refer to. In my case, that makes it more difficult because there were a lot of good points that I want to refer to in my research paper but they will be hard to find because there is no transcript for the hour-long podcast. I am considering using this source when analyzing the advantages and disadvantages (roughly 2nd and 3rd sections) of online learning as well as some solutions to the disadvantages as the host and guest, touch upon all those topics.
Ortagus, Justin C. “From the Periphery to Prominence: An Examination of the Changing
Profile of Online Students in American Higher Education.” The Internet and Higher
Education, vol. 32, 2017, pp. 47–57., doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2016.09.002. Accessed 5 Nov.
2020.
This article is from The Internet and Higher Education Journal that aims to address “contemporary issues” and developments that relate to the internet in relation to education. This particular article, written by Justin Ortagus, an assistant professor/researcher from the University of Florida specializing in education, is meant to analyze the role of online education in the US and its advantages and disadvantages by examining “weighted descriptive statistics.”
The article goes into detail about different student demographics that are using online education (this includes both typical students i.e. high schoolers, university students as well as adult students using online courses to learn independently) and how they all engage with online education. I think the source has value in that it covers a lot of demographics to provide a more holistic view of who uses online education and how much it engages students, which is something that I will be covering in my research paper. A limitation of this source is that it is written with data from before COVID-19 forced most students to rely on online learning, as the disparities I intend on addressing are related to how students are dealing with online education when there are few other options.
That being said, I think that this article is useful overall because it gives me an idea of the preexisting disparities in online education that are further magnified during this time period. I can refer to this article when discussing the range of experiences students can have with online learning as well as which specific student demographics will be most negatively affected and how that issue can be addressed.
Alamri, Abdulrahman, and Tandra Tyler-Wood. “Factors Affecting Learners With
Disabilities–Instructor Interaction in Online Learning.” Journal of Special Education
Technology, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2017, pp. 59–69, doi:10.1177/0162643416681497.
Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.
Alamri and Tyler-Wood are a doctoral student and professor, respectively, from the Department of Learning Technologies from the University of North Texas. This article investigates the different factors that students with different disabilities face when learning via online education and how that impacts their learning outcomes. The study identifies “the teaching and social presences and . . . the facilitation and supporting of individual communication related to interaction among learners with disabilities and their instructors” affect how students viewed their learning achievements and satisfaction with the class. I think this source is valuable because it’s analyzing data from the time of study and provides information that can help to guide the direction of online learning to make the learning process better for students with disabilities. This source is limited because the research pool is relatively small making it so that the conclusions are less generally applicable. I think this source is useful in helping me to flesh out my perspective and argument regarding the impacts of online education on students with disabilities because I had severely limited my focus in regards to this topic while doing preliminary research.
Chingos, Matthew M., et al. “Interactive Online Learning on Campus: Comparing Students’
Outcomes in Hybrid and Traditional Courses in the University System of Maryland.” The
Journal of Higher Education, vol. 88, no. 2, 2016, pp. 210–233.,
doi:10.1080/00221546.2016.1244409. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.
This article is one published in The Journal of Higher Education in 2016, discussing the implementation of online learning systems into pre-existing traditional learning environments during a time when online learning systems became more accessible to everyone with massively open online courses (MOOCs) such as Coursera, Udacity, Skillshare, Masterclass, and more. The article intends to study and analyze the outcomes of introducing hybrid learning courses on student performance. I think this article is valuable because it talks about the implementation of online learning systems holistically to gauge the overall impact on student performance during a time when online learning courses began to rise to popularity very quickly with an uptick in advertisements for them. It definitely provides some perspective which will be relevant in my research paper as I look into ways that online learning can be better incorporated into current learning systems.
This article is limited in that the study was conducted at only one place (roughly 1, 500 students from the university system of Maryland). I think because this study focused on students in post-secondary education, there are a number of demographics that are excluded because postsecondary is not accessible to all students. That being said, I think that this study is useful because it can help to establish a baseline for some of my ideas once I cover different solutions to the problem I identified in the paper since I ultimately am looking towards hybrid learning models as an increasingly viable option for students overall post COVID-19 pandemic.
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