5. Challanges
It doesn't mean the Internet is the right medium for every study, or that it doesn't raise some serious concerns, both practical and ethical, researchers say. The practical challenges include: Obtaining an unbiased sample. No uniform system for randomly selecting e-mail addresses exists, and not all segments of the population have equal access to the Internet.
Verifying the identity of participants. E-mail addresses are hard to match to other forms of identification, single computers can be used by multiple people and minors can easily masquerade as adults.
Controlling the experimental environment. Participants can access Internet-based experiments from settings as diverse as an office, a bedroom, a coffee shop, a library or, using a wireless device, almost anywhere.
Source
ETIENNE BENSON, APA, 2018
eResearch presents many challenges, both technical and organizational – traditional academia rewards individual performance and specialization, not collective and interdisciplinary efforts that characterized eResearch. But eResearch is a paradigm shift that is changing the way that research is conducted and organized in many academic disciplines and research institutions (Bill Appelbe and David Bannon, 2007)
Although these technological and methodological developments have created some vital opportunities to gain new insights into learning and teaching phenomena, they also raise a range of conceptual, methodological, and practical questions and concerns. For example, what kinds of ontological, epistemological and ethical assumptions underpin data-rich educational inquiry? What is the role of theory in data-driven research? What are the opportunities and limits of data-rich visualisation and computational approaches to inform educational practice and policy? What are the prospects of specific research approaches being extended into new areas of educational inquiry? What kind of infrastructure and institutional arrangements would support new forms of collaborative research, evidence-informed practice and scholarship? What sorts of methodological understanding and technological expertise do researchers and other collaborators need for engaging productively with digital forms of educational research?
Source:
Editorial: e-Research for education: Applied, methodological and critical perspectives, British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 45 No 3 2014 385–391 doi:10.1111/bjet.12154