Month: February 2022

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Talking about your research – your take away message

The delightful Mr Grebo

Talking about your research

As a PG researcher, you will inevitably have to give presentations on your research. An opportunity came up in July for me to do just that with an international group of doctoral students as an audience. Hosted by Liverpool John Moores Centre for Educational Research, I recommend you take a look.

Although I had only just completed my 1st year and so had not yet carried out any research, I was still excited to share my many ideas and thoughts.

This was the problem! How to condense a complex subject I really care about so that I can share something interesting with people who nothing about my topic or context. In about 15/20 minutes, when I had enough trouble cutting my summative assessment on the subject down to 10,000 words.

Scene setting

I needed to introduce myself and provide enough about my context that the audience could appreciate the situation. This was the (relatively!) easy part; a bit about me and my background and then linking into the work I am researching with a few headline statistics showing its scope and scale.

Narrowing the focus

Then came the hard part; deciding what to focus on – what the simple “message” was that I wanted the audience to take away with them.  I decided at this early stage my message should be

I am researching if we can use predictive analytics in Toastmasters.

We have all sat through presentations or speeches where the focus is unclear because the speaker wants to tell you everything or doesn’t really have a clear idea what their message should be. My focus was so that if someone in the audience was asked, “what was that talk about?” they could respond with that one simple message.

Content

I decided that I would use a piece of work I had recently done as the basis for my presentation. My summative assessment began with a literature review and ended with my research questions.

Constructing the narrative

Clearly, a well-constructed, academic literature review is too complex to get across in a presentation, but this is not my intention. In my 15/20 minute presentation I just want to get across my one simple message.

I approached this by working backwards.

  • What do you want the audience to know?
    • I am researching PA in Toastmasters
  • How do you get them to that conclusion?
    • Show how my journey led me there
  • What were the key steps/milestones?
    • The research gaps I found
  • How did I find these?
    • Key findings/discoveries (studies) that led me there

Remember less is more! You are just trying to get your audience to remember your one message. Do not overcomplicate as they won’t be able to process it.

If you were asked to present on your research tomorrow, what would your central message be?

You can see a recorded version of my presentation  here.

 

 

Written by

 Selina Griffin @Psylina

After completing my BA (in Classics) in the usual way at a bricks and mortar university, I discovered the Open University and completed an MA. Years later after some soul-searching, I switched fields and completed an MA in Online and Distance Education which has led to me pursuing my EdD in the realm of learning analytics. I am fortunate enough to now also work for the Open University. I also have my own personal blog where I discuss my research, running and my cat @MrGrebo

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Engaging Distance Learners in an Academic Community: Student Hub Live

Photo by Ingo Joseph from Pexels

Congratulations to Dr Karen Foley for successfully competing her doctoral thesis. You can read it here: Engaging Distance Learners in an Academic Community: Student Hub Live – Open Research Online

This is the abstract.

Abstract

In higher education (HE), studies of effective practice relating to student retention, progression and attainment suggest that student engagement is a major factor in terms of success, and this involves a sense of belonging to a community. Studies have identified initiatives that have proved successful in traditional HE contexts, however ideas of belonging and community are problematic when translated to distance-learning contexts. Many distance-learning students, who are often mature and part-time learners, appear to be successful in their studies without identifying as a student or interacting socially with others, which calls into question the way in which belonging is conceptualised in distance-learning settings. The focus of this research was to identify the value of attending specific, live, online, interactive events at Student Hub Live (SHL) which were designed by the Open University to facilitate academic community and to provide a space outside of the curriculum for students to socialise and perform other aspects of student identity that require interaction with others. Using an ethnographic approach and grounded theory methods, chatlogs of four SHL events were analysed and the emergent themes informed semi-structured interviews which were carried out with six participants, all of whom had attended SHL events. Both sets of findings were combined and further analysed using thematic network maps. The finding was that communities of practice with shared repertoires enabled students to feel a sense of belonging through participating in discussions which created a conducive learning environment to develop skills, share experiences and feel validated. Community and belonging enabled students to deeply apply learning to their studies through sharing the experience and their experiences with others. In this sense, belonging and community matter to distance-learning students but for different reasons than for face-to-face students. The findings are relevant to other distance and face-to-face HE providers who are keen to engage students in virtual extracurricular spaces to support learning and facilitate community.