The Intended Research Stages

The design for the research follows four distinct stages.

Stage 1: Pre-course questionnaire
All students commencing the first year of a postgraduate conversion course will be asked to complete a questionnaire. This will provide background details about individual students and a profile of the group as a whole. The information collected will provide variables for correlation with diary results and will enable adaptation and/or verification of Juler’s interactional network. Students will be encouraged to complete it as soon as they receive an introductory letter explaining the research with their study materials. The questionnaire responses will be reported in Excel and the variables and data will be entered into SPSS for analysis.

Stage 2: Module diary
All students taking the Information Management and Control module will be required to keep a 24 hour diary for a 7 day period. Additionally they will be asked to record the time that they spend on specific learning activities scheduled to be studied during the recording week. Keeping the diary and recording their time for activities will be an explicit learning activity within the module. Students will be required to submit their diary with their second assignment at the end of the module. The students will be provided with an Excel spreadsheet to complete. They will be provided with instructions in how to interpret and enter their time for a limited range of pre-determined daily activities. For assessment purposes students will be required to provide an analysis of their diary and to present the data in an appropriate manner.

The spreadsheets will be collected electronically and data retrieval used to strip out individual results into a summary spreadsheet. The results will then form variables to be entered into SPSS for comparison with the pre-course data so providing conclusions on student’s use of time and weekly commitment. The results for the scheduled activities will be compared with the estimated times to assess the validity of the rules-of-thumb used. Analysis of the diaries will also provide insight into student’s online time and provide evidence of how much time is appropriate for such learning.

Stage 3: Post-module questionnaire
All students taking the module will be asked to complete a short questionnaire on completion of the module. This will establish both their feelings about their use of time and give opportunity for any specific problems encountered to be identified. It will identify the level of usage made of the different resources during the module study period. Combined with other source information (see below) it will provide conclusions about the effectiveness of the activities and the time student’s devote to these. As with the pre-course questionnaire it will be administered online and the variables and data entered into SPSS.

The data collected through these three stages will be supplemented / verified by secondary data taken from College sources. These include:
Blackboard statistics – detailing access to different areas and discussion boards within the virtual learning environment. This provides a means for validating the accuracy of the student diaries.
Forum participation – detailing the messages posted by individual students and enabling rating of the quality of student engagement with the online activities. Results from this will additionally verify diary entries and enable validation of the assignment mark (including the mark for participation). The level of participation will also assist in validating student’s perceived learning as expressed in the post-module questionnaire.
Assignment feedback and mark – detailing the tutor’s view of the student’s performance in completing the assignment. This provides an independent verification of the effectiveness of the student’s learning through the activities completed.
Module mark – details the overall performance of the student and enables testing of the results from the post-module questionnaire.

Stage 4: Case studies
A sample of 50 students will be tracked over the succeeding three modules to establish how their circumstances and performance may change as they progress further with their studies. This final stage will enable validation of the results for the focus module. Each student will be asked to complete post-module questionnaires as they finish the modules. The extension of the research to cover these modules enables differences in subject to be considered for possible affect on the use of time. Students will not be required to complete a post-module questionnaire for their fourth module. Instead short interviews will be conducted by phone with each of the sample members to obtain overall views and to verify findings.