Research Agenda and Proposals

The ECAR research agenda is subscriber driven. Each year, ECAR organizes focus groups and listening posts to develop an understanding of the foremost issues on the minds of EDUCAUSE members and ECAR subscribers. That information, together with the results of reviews of the academic literature, the annual EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey, and other sources, form a dataset of research possibilities.

The ECAR fellowship meets annually to set research priorities. Research possibilities are laid out and are then prioritized according to several criteria:

• Potential interest to ECAR subscribers—a year from the time of the meeting
• ECAR capacity to deliver high-quality research on the topic—an assessment of organizational competencies and resources
• The shelf life of the topic—is this a durable topic that can recapture the investment of effort and resources, or is it a transitory issue that might be better analyzed in research bulletins, roadmaps, or other formats?

Those research possibilities that withstand these filters are ranked by the ECAR research fellows, and the top six to eight topics are identified. Potential projects are then summarized in a research brief, a short prospectus that describes the potential scope of research, the context of the issue, and the hypotheses that the proposed research will test.

Research briefs are submitted to the EDUCAUSE Executive Team for final adjudication. The dominant criteria used in this review are:

• Relevance and importance to the overall EDUCAUSE membership; and
• Balance across EDUCAUSE thought domains of: (1) teaching and learning; (2) administrative information systems; (3) management issues; and (4) networking and middleware.

Four major research priorities are thus identified for a one-year period. Each research project takes seven to twelve months to complete.

Research proposals will be considered from individuals or teams on topics related to information technology administrative issues, general interest issues, networking issues, and teaching and learning issues. See the link to “Information About Research Proposals.”