Professor Ben Levin is Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy at OISE, University of Toronto, where Hilary Edelstein is a Ph. D. student. Both are members of the Research Supporting Practice in Education (RSPE) team at OISE.
Are websites conducive for research dissemination?
The use of online research uptake
The use of online research (UOR) project is a collaboration between the Research Supporting Practice in Education (RSPE) team at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and several research-based educational organizations in Canada, the UK and New Zealand. The Canadian Education Association (CEA) is one of the partners in this project.
The project looks at the uptake of web-based research on educational organizations’ websites. While the literature says that websites are a primary vehicle for research dissemination, there has been very little research looking into whether or not people actually use these online research products and even less work has explored how they use them. Our objective is to address this gap by studying how people utilize research materials posted on websites of educational organizations.
Figure 1. Visitor data overview
We use two data sources, Google Analytics and a survey to understand how educational organizations’ websites are used and if the visitors to these websites download research materials and use them to influence their practice.
Data from the CEA website demonstrates that in 2011:
- Over 130,000 people visited CEA’s website
- 10, 579 documents were downloaded from CEA’s website
- 72% of people who visited the site were new visit, while 27% of the visitors are repeat visitors
Our preliminary findings focus on:
- Informal sharing of online research is more frequent than formal sharing strategies.
· In our survey we asked if visitors share what they find online in formal versus informal ways in and outside of their workplaces. More visitors reported a preference for sharing results informally (i.e. casual discussions) with fewer respondents willing to share research they found online through formal sharing mechanisms (i.e. presentations). - There is very little traffic to research pages as compared to the homepage or non-research based pages. Additionally, visitors spent less time on research pages compared with other pages.
· On CEA’s site, 39% of the total visitors to the site went to what have been identified as the research pages (overall initiative page; WDYIST page; Youth confidence page; research and publications page)
· The average time that visitors spent on CEA’s research pages was one minute and thirty seconds - The homepage of a website is rarely the point of entry; therefore, we need to rethink how websites are organized to maximize navigation and the use of research found online. This includes differences in the number of times homepages are visited and viewed.
· We have found that 10% of the visitors to CEA’s website view the homepage compared to page views of the overall site
· 25% of the overall visitors to CEA’s website visit the homepage
Figure 2. Visitor flow from country to pages
Our data analysis points to the modest use of research-related pages compared to non-research pages and overall site traffic. ) We conclude that:
- The effort put into sharing products online (i.e. the number of products posted online) is not matched by broad uptake (i.e. the amount of downloads compared to the number of products available).
- From an analysis of educational organization’s websites, there is more effort spent on passive dissemination strategies, such as posting products, rather than active strategies, such as networking events between research producers and research users.
To participate in the project, go to https://surveys.oise.utoronto.ca/surveyviewer2/index.php?surveyID=WGGSE to fill in the OISE-CEA survey!
