Research Toolkit

The DETA Research Toolkit serves to guide research conducted across institutions and disciplines, including both experimental and survey studies. DETA is looking to identify partners across the country who are interested in using the toolkit to gather data to better understand the key factors in distance education courses and programs that are impacting student success, in particular for minorities, first generation students, and students with disabilities. Once research has been conducted, an evaluation of the toolkit will be conducted to improve the quality of the grant products for dissemination in the final year of the grant. Any feedback is appreciated.

To provide a little background on the development of the toolkit, in year one of the grant (2014-2015), the DETA Research Center and its partners worked with distance education experts and other stakeholders to develop the research model and framework of inquiry serving as a foundation for the DETA research toolkit. The toolkit is intended to be used by researchers and practitioners across the country to gather data in line with the grant goals. Inside the toolkit one will find pertinent research questions, guides to designing and conducting rigorous research, a student survey instrument packet, and data codebooks to help identify key variables, measures, and associated instrumentation. Moreover, the codes of the measures allow for an easier recoding and merging of data for cross-institutional analysis.

The DETA Research Center will work to gather data from grant awardees and other non-funded partners for further analysis and to aggregate findings for greater dissemination.

The general RFP for distance education research and CBE-specific RFP are both closed.

Download the DETA Research Toolkit

Please take a moment give us some information about yourself so that we can better understand who is using the toolkit.