In this research showcase, we will be summarizing insights from focus group interviews in Latin America that offer a window into the experiences of young people themselves. Taken together, these perspectives might help us to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how young people in Latin America use the Internet in general and interact with information from online sources in particular.
Characterizing the Online Learning Landscape: What and How People Learn Online
Hundreds of millions of people learn something new online every day. Simultaneously, the study of online education has blossomed with new systems, experiments, and observations creating and exploring previously undiscovered online learning environments. In this talk I will discuss our study, in which we endeavor to characterize this entire landscape of online learning experiences using a national survey of 2260 US adults who are balanced to match the demographics of the U.S. We examine the online learning resources that they consult, and we analyze the subjects that they pursue using those resources. Furthermore, we compare both formal and informal online learning experiences on a larger scale than has ever been done before, to our knowledge, to better understand which subjects people are seeking for intensive study. We find that there is a core set of online learning experiences that are central to other experiences and these are shared among the majority of people who learn online.
Speaker: Sean Kross, University of California San Diego