Global pressures on education research: quality, utility, and infrastructure

Abstract

This article provides an overview of issues likely to drive educational research globally over the next decade, and it examines the Asia Pacific Education Review (APER)’s role in responding to these issues, shaping research agendas, and delivering high-quality research. We also look at the implications of these pressures, along with changes in the academic infrastructure, regarding the form, distribution, quality, and utility of education research. We focus on three pressures in particular: a new demography of education, the changing technology of education, and the expansion of higher education and the research university. Demographic pressures create demand for new and different types of institutional responses and have created a new set of issues in education. Technological innovations promise to challenge current systems. MOOCs, web-based professional development for adults, mobile learning, and web-based performance supports for younger students will alter the physical, intellectual, and learning environments of higher education. How might these developments affect the infrastructure of academic research? Quality control will become even more central. It is a strength of academe, something which research institutions are particularly well designed to conduct. Growth in the higher education sector has been accompanied by equally unprecedented growth in research programs, research-trained faculty, and research-oriented universities. This, in turn, has produced pressure for more publications and journals. We conclude with a discussion of how the educational research community will likely respond to these challenges and the role of APER in this process.