Learn how an instructional designer and a faculty member launched an IRB approved research project that involves analyzing student-produced artifacts from an active online course. From IRB proposal to study design to data collection, learn from our struggles and triumphs and draft a potential research study for your own project.
Research has long been an established priority for faculty in higher education, but it represents an underutilized opportunity for learning design teams to bring even more value to the instructor-designer partnership by supporting and promoting research in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). In addition to contributing to the body of knowledge in the area of teaching and learning, conducting research in the classroom can benefit faculty looking to add to their portfolios for tenure consideration or those who are simply looking to publish, and research outcomes can be incredibly valuable feedback when considering course design and future programmatic planning.
While the benefits of research are clear to many who work in academic settings, the question of how to get started is generally the most difficult hurdle to overcome. In this session, an instructor-practitioner and instructional designer will share their story of planning, proposing, and executing a research study in an active course. Utilizing examples from our study, we will include some actionable advice, such as how to design a study proposal that maximizes opportunity for further research in areas of interest to both the faculty and the instructional designer.
We will discuss the critical success factors that contributed to making our idea for the study an actual reality, such as obtaining support from administrators by emphasizing the benefits of developing the instructor-designer research partnership and the perspectives provided by crossing the traditional borders of these roles during collaborative research activities. We will also share strategies for generating student buy-in for participation in the study. Using examples from our study, we will share how we built assignments into the course that provided appropriate data related to our specific research questions.
In addition, attendees will also learn about the challenges we faced when planning a research study in an active class, and how we worked with and learned from our IRB contact to adapt our study and our methods to accommodate those issues. Attendees will have the opportunity to generate some ideas of their own about how to overcome similar challenges they may encounter when considering launching a research study.
Further, we will share how we plan to use the same data to research different areas of interest, thus maximizing the value of the effort. For example, the instructor in the research partnership is interested in taking a more discipline specific angle to data analysis, whereas the designer is analyzing the data from the instructional design and learning sciences perspective. We will talk about our experiences and how they overlapped, and what we learned from the differences in approaches and how those experiences directly applied to our practice in facilitating and designing learning.
Objectives
At the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
- Explain the general process of planning, proposing, and executing a research study
- Recognize potential pitfalls and challenges to conducting approved research in active courses
- Generate potential solutions to aforementioned challenges surrounding research in active courses
- Discuss critical success factors for faculty-designer research partnerships
- Draft a working version of a research study proposal