Reviewing our methodology

January 20th
A local meeting of one of the Strand A cluster groups at the University of Hertfordshire gave me a useful opportunity to meet up and hear from some of these projects and to share our progress in Strand B EEVS so far. Following on from the 2-minute review I gave online at  the JISC swapshop on Monday January 16th I could elaborate further on our methodology and our experiences of the student input to date.

Feedback from peers and their 'critical friend' Peter Bullen offered a valuable conversation in terms of how we can manage the outputs from our students who have enthusiastically contributed  their reflections on EVS use.

Our work so far and what is coming next

It is hard to believe that already four months have gone by since the beginning of the project! Needless to say we were very busy, collecting data, reading, talking to colleagues and thinking (!). This is in addition to all other work that we both do in our respective schools. Although we work in different schools and on different sites we try to have regular weekly meetings, face-to-face or via skype. In this blog, we will summarise what we have done so far and what we are doing next…

Our work so far has been focused on three areas: literature review, data collection and selection of methodology.

A simple google scholar title search produced more than 750 conference or journal papers related to the use of EVS (a.k.a. clickers, PRS, response system, e-voting etc.) for learning, assessment or feedback! However very few of those articles focus on institutional issues and subject differences, and are mainly concerned with pedagogical implications (e.g. improved in-class interactions, engagement in large groups etc.) Therefore, it looks like our work will start to address an obvious gap in this area of literature!

Our data is coming from different directions: we have (or will have soon in some cases) reflections from around 30 students ‘bloggers’ from 8 different schools. They all recorded their experiences in using EVS in their respective subjects in ‘real-time’ over a period of 3-4 weeks either via textual blog, podcast or vlog. This is in addition to reports and interviews from around 10 staff members who led the EVS deployment in their respective schools in previous academic year.

Last but not least, we though long and hard about the right methodology for this work and agreed that a combination of grounded theory research and case-study approach is the best way forward for this. Glynis Cousin’s  book on Researching learning in higher education was a very useful resource in helping us make this decision…

We are currently focusing on the following three areas: finalizing a student questionnaire (to be administered via BOS to potentially more than 4000 students across the university); analyzing data that we already have (from students, staff and literature); planning further focus groups and interviews with other stakeholders…

If this looks like too much work, well, yes it is! But we enjoy working together and hope to make some sense from the copious amounts of data that we seem to be accumulating and make a useful contribution to the sector!

And yes, we keep in touch with out “big brother”, iTEAM project.  In fact we just got an invitation to participate in their cluster meeting this week!

From now on we will post regular updates and would welcome comments from other projects and JISC community!