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.