Exploring contributions to scholarship in e-learning : weighing up the evidence

Recent views on the scholarship of teaching and learning have conceptualised the work of teachers as a form of inquiry, drawing on scholarly discourse about teaching and learning and communicating new understandings back to the scholarly community for peer review and evaluation. Knowledge about teaching may be based on a variety of forms of evidence, including research, evaluation, reflection, review, and the discussion or development of theoretical perspectives, ideas and concepts. This raises questions about the quality and forms of evidence about teaching which contribute to scholarship, whether these are the same in relation e-teaching and learning as they are for teaching in other contexts, and the implications of different forms of evidence for the relationship between research and teaching. In this paper we examine articles from three recent issues of three journals (two of them relating to e-learning and one to higher education in general), in order to draw some preliminary conclusions about the kind of contributions to discourse about e-learning which may be regarded as valuable in advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning.