Digital education reading group: July 2025
In our July meeting we are looking forward to welcoming Leonard Houx as our host. Leonard has a long history with reading groups as he previously organised the London eLearning reading group, one of the inspirations behind our own group. Leonard is a CODE Fellow and Director of Learning Design at Cambridge Education Group. He has sourced an extremely relevant and insightful new piece of research for us, and poses some thought-provoking questions.
Imagine you’re building a new online course. You want the course to get the best possible results for students. How would you design it? What pedagogical practices would you prioritise?
According to a recent study, the pedagogical practices we might prioritise may not be the ones that the most successful online courses do.
This month, we’re diving into some exciting research that systematically examined 100 online courses at a US community college to identify the pedagogical practices that characterise modules with strong student outcomes.
The 2025 study by Qiujie Li, Xuehan Zhou and Di Xu reveals some surprising findings. While many assume that broad, high-level frameworks seamlessly translate into student success, the researchers found that success may lie in the details.
Four key practices emerged as the most correlated with student success:
- Clearly articulated learning objectives
- Diversified content delivery media
- Regular announcements and reminders
- Opportunities for non-content-related social interaction
Perhaps most intriguingly, some widely-promoted practices showed negative correlations with student performance, challenging conventional wisdom about what constitutes “good” online teaching.
Join us to consider
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of studies like these? (And why aren’t there many of them?)
- What do these findings mean for online education?
- How can institutions balance efficiency with engagement?
- And what should we prioritise when resources are limited?
Reading
Full article available with your University of London library credentials.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas. Let us know if you have any questions or need help accessing the materials.
Leonard Houx
List of topics discussed at previous meetings
