Tracking Trends in ODeL Research Methodologies in South Africa

To ensure the sustained advancement of quality benchmarks, institutional systems must engage in systematic and periodic evaluations of their publication strategies. Given that Open, Distance, and e-Learning (ODeL) remains an emergent and evolving academic domain, particularly within the South African higher education landscape, there is a pressing need to institutionalise such evaluative processes as part of its developmental trajectory. This study aimed to determine the methodological and paradigmatic trends applied within ODeL publications in the South African context within a five-year trajectory, to identify research methodological trends and gaps in these areas. The researchers identified the paradigm and methodological trends used in these publications by applying the period from 2015 to 2019 to published academic journal papers written by South African researchers within the ODeL context. This allowed for the visualisation of methodological and paradigmatic trends in ODeL publications in various disciplines within five years. The data were obtained from the SCOPUS and SABINET databases, using the same search criteria employed by previous research carried out by Roberts (2021) and Roberts and Van der Walt (2022) into the research levels of South African ODeL publications. The researchers employed a deductive coding process and coded for a variety of variables related to the study’s objectives, including the paradigmatic approach, research design, research method, data analysis and discipline domains. The results indicate that ODeL research is conducted mainly within the academic field of education and that South African ODeL publications primarily employ descriptive, exploratory and qualitative research approaches.