Mehlenbacher's research interest in instruction and learning with technology is informed by the multidisciplinary relationship between the learning sciences, communication design, educational technologies, rhetorical theory, and human-computer interaction. His long-term research goal is to develop and provide a common framework for characterizing, understanding, describing, and evaluating the complex interactions between technology, learning, and instruction. Over the last several years, Mehlenbacher has published or presented research on education in virtual worlds, on the use of games in online learning environments, on cloud-based collaboration, on Twitter’s influence on time and communication, on assessing technology-augmented learning, on the pedagogical underpinnings of MOOCs, on the influence of email on academic time management, on online identity and student plagiarism in online instruction, and on the use of virtual co-locational technologies in globally-distributed educational spaces.
