Category Archives: Research questions

Doing a pilot study

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A171 Start writing for the Internet, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 80 students – evenly balanced between males and females.

A173 Writing family history, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 180 students – mostly women. Also has an OUSA cafe.

T183 Design and the web, 10 points, starts May, runs for 10 weeks. About 400 students – evenly balanced between males and females.

I could do participant observation on one of these. In fact, these ten-point courses are quite good for me and for data collection, as they run four times a year so I could, theoretically, do four or five of these, one after the other.

This would be a substantial pilot, running May / June / July. To have something for my probationary assessment, I need to do something else.

For example, if Karen and Denise have records of a FirstClass conference which I could use, I could
(a) try out detailed discourse analysis on short sections of this
(b) analyse it for key subject positions. This would give me a basic framework for analysis of later data.
(c) find evidence of learning being supported and/or discouraged 
(d) investigate the role of the medium / the staff in positioning students.
(e) use the experience to refine my research questions.
If possible, I could experiment with corpus analysis, using Denise and Karen’s conference data. This would give me a chance to find out more about this method, to get to grips with any relevant software and to start to build up a corpus. I’d like to know whether corpus analysis can be used to map changes over time – for example, in pronoun use, the use of technical vocabulary, or in the use of descriptors. Can it be used to look at the stage at which a supervisor makes a comment, or at what students responses to supervisors’ comments tend to be? Does it only work with millions of words of data, or can I pilot it with fairly small amounts of data?

Those pilots would use other people’s data and so they might not get ethical approval. In that case, I could probably try out discourse analysis methods on my U800 data or on some of the FirstClass cafes which are open to all. This would be more like a TMA than a pilot – so I’d like to do more than this, if possible.

I can’t see much point in piloting my interviewing unless I have access to a course conference.

 

Resesarch methods

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Well, there’s a lot of discourse analysis here.

* Corpus analysis. I put the text of all four conferences into a data base and pull out subject positions in some way.

* I follow the trajectory of individual students. I’d like to supplement this with interviews.

* I look at the whole conference, pull out interactions which I think are particularly salient and analyse them in depth. Perhaps do this with particular emphasis on interventions from tutors/moderators.

* I also need to find evidence of learning being supported and discouraged and I think I need to refer here to Neil Mercer’s work on exploratory talk. Can I see the students building knowledge? Do they think they are learning?

* I need to look at whether this is a learning community. Do the participants perceive it as such? Does it behave like a learning community.

* I think it’s important to look at what’s happening backstage. Who’s lurking, how are they lurking (I think I can access this through message history). How are they linking up outside FirstClass? This needs interviews and participant observation.

* Epistolary interviews make sense here: I’m interested in this method, the whole research project is about online interaction. These could be backed up by face to face and telephone interviews.

* I’d like to interview the course team and the techies about the nuts and bolts of building this community. Which features are inherent in FirstClass? What does the Open University require? Where did they get their experience of working with an online learning community? I think this is important from the point of view of making this applied research.

* I’d like to look at the subeject positions assigned / created by the OU. How has the OU classified these students for its own research purposes? Which classifications have the students had to fit into to be at the Open University / on this course? Which subject positions does the OU push students into? This would require analysis of course and OU literature, and of material held by the survey office.

Research questions

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* Which are the main subject positions to be found within a learning community which comes together in an aynchronous online environment?

* How are these subject positions introduced or created?

* Which of these subject positions work to support learning, and which discourage learning?

* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?  

How would I answer these questions? Well, first of all I’ve got to find an online community which comes together in an asynchronous environment. It’s probably best if they only come together online, because then I have access to all the whole-community activity. The other activity of the comunity eg texts, emails, IMs, meetings, phone conversations I could catch either through interviews or through participant observation.

I’d probably want more than one community so I could generalise. On the other hand, this is potentially a vast set of data, so I don’t want to go wild and have lots of communities. What about one community on which I focus, and another three where I observe but don’t collect so much data? 

So, four OU courses which come together via First Class. They’d better be undergraduate, because postgraduate isn’t so generalisable. They’d better be in different disciplines, because that makes it more generalisable. If I want to be a participant observer it might be best to have a course that I’ll find relatively easy, so I don’t have to waste huge amounts of time doing the work. Or, another possibility, if I were tutoring on the course I’d have access to different sorts of data.

And position/identity has a very strong link with gender so I’d like to look at a mostly boy course and a mostly girl course, and perhaps at a level one / openings course where people aren’t used to being students, and a level three course where they’re used to learning.

And it;s probably better if they’re not being too reflexive, so not one of the courses on identity.

Research questions (10.11.05)

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I’m reading a report by Bonk and Wisher on collaborative and e-learning tools.
http://publicationshare.com/docs/Dist.Learn(Wisher).pdf
They identify the following questions, most of which seem to originate in Chao’s unpublished thesis.

I like question 8 about the development of trust and openness.

1. What conditions foster online learning communities? What social structures must be in place?
2. At what point does the learner or participant become part of the community?
3. How can CMC environments substitute for the social cues of FTF environments that help foster a sense of community?
4. When and how do students develop a sense of online communities within both training and higher education classes? What principles, practices, and tools spur the growth of learning communities?
5. How does the development of a learning community relate to student perceptions of course tasks and activities?
6. Does the formation of new relationships relate to the depth of student learning?
7. How do instructor styles, student experiences with e-learning, and course materials contribute to the development of an online community?
8. How do such characteristics as trust, support, openness, knowledge sharing, negotiation of meaning, and influence emerge and evolve?
9. How do permanent learning communities differ from temporary classroom-based learning communities?
10. Why do people use a site? Why do new people join the asynchronous learning network? What motivates their participation? What are their expectations?

In addition to the questions above, it is important to understand the tools that positively impact the sharing of information and mutual understanding of participants. How do online tools provide a shared social space for instructor and student interaction? Just how do participants share knowledge and experience? What must be present in the learning community for significant knowledge negotiation?

Gill commented on this: Just an idea that bounced off my head as I read this – one of the aspects of mobile learning that I was quite keen to pursue was collaborative learning. However at the moment, I’m not so sure. The little pilot study I did for U800 into how experienced PDA and Smartphone users use their mobile devices to support their informal learning projects assumed that because of the high levels of connectivity that people would engage in some forms of collaborative learning.

At first glance, this did not seem to be the case. Learners (such as students) who were all engaged in the same subject and in the same physical location did collaborate, sharing information by beaming. Other learners only collaborated via web forums – posting problems and helping each other out.

For the most part, the informal learning projects supported by mobile devices seemed fairly solitary unless people were also co-located physically.

Maybe you need a framework in place to promote and support collaborative learning.

Gill
Comment from euphloozie – 18/11/05 09:41

Research question (9.11.05)

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OK, here is the first ever formulation of my PhD research question (after I ditched the original idea about international communities in primary schools).

How do people successfully become members of an online learning community?

And the sub-quesion: ‘What problems and limitations stand in the way of successful membership?

Dave Wield suggested formulating the question in different ways, so here goes:
Why… do people have problems when forming online learning communities?
Where… are the most successful online learning communites found?
When… does a successful online learning community form?
How… do people become successful members of online learning communities?
What if… I had to design an ideal online learning community?