Open Access News

Cathy S. Cavanaugh, Michael K. Barbour, and Tom Clark, Research and Practice in K-12 Online Learning: A Review of Open Access Literature, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, February 2009. 

Abstract:   The literature related to online learning programs for K-12 students dates to the mid-1990s and builds upon a century of research and practice from K-12 distance education. While K-12 online learning programs have evolved and grown over the past decade, the amount of published research on virtual schooling practice and policy is limited. The current literature includes practitioner reports and experimental and quasi-experimental studies, both published and unpublished. This paper reviews open access literature in K-12 online learning and reports on a structured content analysis of the documents. Themes in the literature include steady growth and a focus on the benefits, challenges, and broad effectiveness of K-12 online learning. In addition, newly developed standards for K-12 online learning are emerging in descriptions of effective practices.

Comment.  This is the first literature review I've seen which deliberately limits itself to OA literature.  Don't jump to conclusions about why the authors did it this way.  They do not believe "if it's not OA, then it's not worth reading".  They did not decide to review what was ready to hand because they lacked access to much of the TA literature.  (Some of the co-authors have published previous literature reviews focusing on the TA literature.)  They did not assume that OA literature and TA literature differ in the topics they cover or conclusions they draw, which one could only know by reviewing of the TA literature as well.  From the body of the paper:

The decision to use only open access documents was made for two reasons. The initial search of literature revealed that individuals outside of the academy authored the majority of documents; thus, the authors may not have regular or free access to subscription-based publications. Also, because the authors were interested in presenting this paper to the practitioner community, we wanted to ensure that this audience was able to access the documents on which our metasynthesis was based....

One day soon we'll see another kind of literature review limited to OA literature:  one based on sophisticated text mining.  The authors will explain that only OA literature is technically and legally amenable to that kind of analysis.

Update (3/18/09). See the blog post by co-author Michael Barbour, responding to mine. In the comment section I clarify and extend what I said here.