Climbing Aboard the Online Research MO-PED-Fuelling Good Online Education Outcomes with Good Online Research Programmes

Online education is our brave new education world, providing unique challenges and opportunities for its rapidly growing numbers of students, instructors and course developers. The brave new opportunities of online education include an opportunity for online course educators to develop, teach and refine online courses based on empirical evidence of the comparative value of various online course feature possibilities. Basing online course development on research evidence allows online education best practice. As such, online education research programmes are increasingly necessary to guide the optimal advance of online education. This chapter describes the development, implementation and lessons learned by a particular early online education research programme-the Monash Online-Psychology Education Division (MO-PED). The MO-PED was started to support the research evidence-based development and refinement of a particular course-Monash University’s fully online fourth-year level Graduate Diploma of Psychology Advanced (GDPA)-and grew to support non course specific online education research and associated research collaborations. The key MO-PED online education research collaboration has been with King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN). MO-PED’s online education research has included explorations of the importance of building an online sense of community, understanding the drivers and barriers of effective online study, and with King’s College, London, investigating the benefits of online mindfulness course components.