Online Teaching and Learning: Compendium of MethodSpace Posts

With the spread of the novel coronavirus and its attendant COVID-19 outbreak, educators, students, and institutions have moved classrooms online. These articles and resources seek to assist in that educational effort, easing the transition to the online landscape.

Planning Assignments and Projects

Teach Methods Across the Curriculum: Interviews and the Classroom: "You can help your students develop research skills, even when you are not teaching courses that focus on research methods. Create active, experiential projects that ask students to collect and analyze responses to written or verbal questions. Being able to ask thoughtful questions is a valuable life, career AND research skillset..."

Using SAGE Resources in Online Teaching

A Case for Teaching Methods: "What is it like to actually do research? And what are my options if/when something goes wrong, when my pristine design hits the messy real world?  Research cases offer one way to gain a holistic and realistic view of the empirical process and allow us to learn from the trials and errors of successful researchers."

Teaching Methods with Research Cases: Participatory Action Research: "Cases can be used in a multitude of ways for teaching the practice of research. While research texts and books offer fundamental principles, and articles discuss research that applies these principles, case studies offer a holistic viewpoint. Cases show how the theoretical and procedural aspects of research design fit together. They discuss what happened in the course of the study, including decision-making and problem-solving strategies used to overcome obstacles."

Methods in Action: Teaching Using Case Studies: "The term case study is used in a variety of ways. Qualitative and mixed methods researchers use case study methodologies to design and conduct research, and they may call the presentation of their findings a case study. Case studies are widely used in teaching, and such cases are constructed to highlight particular..."

SRM Social Bookmarking with Reading Lists: "This is the first of a series of posts about the Reading List feature in SAGE Research Methods. This post will explain how Reading Lists work and in subsequent posts I will explore ways to use them in teaching, guiding researchers, or building community around a research topic, method, or discipline..."

Teaching Methods with Reading Lists: "If you are a MethodSpace regular, you know that posts often include embedded Reading Lists. These lists include e-books, articles, case studies, videos, and datasets available to read or download from SAGE Research Methods. SAGE Research Methods is a library-within-a-library, a subscription-based component of many academic digital libraries..."

5 Ways to Use SRM Reading Lists 4 Teaching Methods: "Reading Lists are a feature of the SAGE Research Methods library. This social bookmarking tool allows you to create and share lists of resources, including e-books or book chapters, articles, case studies, videos, or datasets. See how-to steps here, and an example here. If you teach research methods, or teach courses that depend on an understanding of research methods, or supervise students’ research, Reading Lists can help. Here are 5 suggestions."

Using Datasets to Teach Qualitative Researchers: " Active, experiential methods are widely seen as the best way to prepare future researchers. Sometimes that means practicing interview or observation skills in classroom exercises, and other times that means going outside the classroom to conduct a research project. Another way to use active learning is through the use of archival data or datasets..."

Using Datasets to Teach Quantitative Researchers: "One way for novice or student researchers to learn a new method or software is with practice datasets. In this post you can find a Reading List with 50 quantitative datasets available on SAGE Research Methods..."

Facilitating Online Classes

Online Collaboration & Learning: Highlights from e/merge Africa Festival: "In this series of posts we shared resources and ideas presented at summer festivals. Can’t fly around the world to attend? No worries–  MethodSpace readers can learn from the presentations and related resources made available online."

Teaching Research Methods (or Using Research Activities in Curricular Courses)

Creating a Culture of Inquiry in the Classroom: "For the moment let’s set aside the details associated with various methodologies and think about the core elements of the research process. In most cases, we begin with a problem, and define the questions we want to answer. We find people or materials to explore and gather relevant data. After we analyze it, we tried to draw some kind of conclusions then share what was learned by presenting it to others in written or verbal form. We carry out these steps within epistemological and theoretical frameworks that help us understand and explain their positions as researchers in relationships with the world. How can we use these steps to build a culture of inquiry in classes we teach?"

Using Inquiry Models to Learn How to Ask Questions: "At its most fundamental level, research is about asking questions. This is true whether we are literally asking questions to participants through interviews or surveys, or looking for answers to our questions in the literature or social networking posts. If we are not curious, if we don’t know how to ask questions with an open mind, it is hard to be a good researcher. How do you teach someone to be curious? How do you motivate someone to cultivate an inquiring mind? How do you encourage students to develop the creative and critical thinking skills they will need as researchers? What are inquiry models? Inquiry models of teaching aim to stimulate students’ and participants’ curiosity and build their skills in finding, analyzing, and using new information to answer questions and solve problems."

Teaching Research Methods using Collaborative Learning: " How do future researchers learn the skills they will need to succeed in academic research and related professional work, where collaborative and interdisciplinary teamwork are increasingly expected?  One way is by using collaborative learning methods that allow students to gain the experience of working together to conduct, analyze, and/or write about research while still in the classroom. Let’s look for insights from researchers whose work has been featured on MethodSpace."

Active Online Learning: "I was an early adopter for online teaching and learning. My experience teaching, developing courses, and consulting about e-learning morphed into an interest in online research. Why, I asked, couldn’t we use the kinds of electronic communications tools used in e-learning to communicate and collect data with participants? Of course we can!"

Teaching & Mentoring Commonplaces: "Sometimes it is useful to step away from the to-do list and everyday details and look at the proverbial big picture. I’ve adapted Joseph Schwab’s (1983) “commonplaces” for the purpose of taking a holistic view of ways we teach methods and guide researchers. Schwab, writing in the context of curriculum reform, proposed a collaborative approach that took into consideration the factors and listened to voices from four critical angles: the instructor, the students, the subject matter content, and the mileu."

Assessing Progress and Outcomes

Mentoring and Supervising Masters and Doctoral Students

Cultivating Mentoring Digitally and Among Peers: "Over the past few years, I have been working with a couple of scholars to understand more about how formal and informal mentoring experiences expose academic writers, researchers, and higher education professionals to resources and pathways for their own career growth. Many see their research advisers, supervisors, and sometimes leaders in a particular field as a formal mentor. Traditionally, mentoring is viewed as a face-to-face, long-term relationship with interactions between an experienced colleague and a novice professional or learner to support professional, academic, or personal development of the protégé..."

Holistic Approaches for Teaching & Mentoring Researchers: "I attended Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, which instilled a sense of systems thinking that has stuck with me. Taking an ecological approach to research instruction and supervision allows students and novice researchers to understand how pieces of an empirical study fit together... We teach students about research methods for two main reasons..."

Intercultural Learning: Foundations for Intercultural Research: "We are exploring Indigenous and Intercultural Research on MethodSpace this month. (See the entire series here.) We’re learning from perspectives of Indigenous researchers, as well as from researchers who enter others’ cultures to pursue their inquiries. Intercultural learning can help researchers develop the self-awareness and understanding necessary to interact respectfully with community members, gatekeepers, and participants..."

Teaching & Supervising Research: Podcasts: A list of podcasts about teaching and supervising research.