Thursday, November 8, 2007

Assignment 10, Method Section

In this section, the methods implemented to explore the topic of new media in online learning environments will be explained in detail. First, the recruitment process will be explored. Second, the development of the online survey instrument will be discussed and the process of how the final research questions were selected will be explained. Finally, the actual implementation of the online survey and some of the issues of using this tool as a method of data collection will be discussed.

SUBJECTS

The recruitment process for the participants in this study was informal and anonymous. I wanted to be sure that a majority of the population were adult learners with higher education backgrounds, so I sent out the hyperlink in an email directed to the faculty of Riverside Community College, Moreno Valley campus as well as classified staff of our campus. The participants were told that the survey should only take about 15 minutes of their time. By sending the email to the faculty of the college, this would ensure that each participant obtained at least a Masters degree or higher. About half of the classified staff at our campus has a minimum of a Bachelors degree, but there are about half of the staff that do not have a degree at all. I would have to state that this half of the staff would not participate in the survey in the first place, so I believe that it would not really affect the results by sending out the invitation to all of the staff members. There was also a few select individuals who I personally invited to participate in the survey by handing them a paper with the URL link printed on the paper.

INSTRUMENT

The development of the final research questions was a very involved process. Each student in ETEC 543 was asked to submit several potential research questions on the topic of new media in online learning, adult learning and issues with online classes in general. These questions were collected and categorized. At first, the potential questions were grouped in a semi-structured way. Then the questions were split into two categories: media choice/adoptions/use and andragogy and online learning. The first category had 12 questions and the second category had 5 questions. By splitting the questions into two categories, this process helped to clarify exactly what the research project is focusing on.

The next step in the refining process was to revise and reduce the number of questions in each of the two categories. In the first category, 9 out of the 12 potential research questions were crossed off and in the second category, 3 out of the 5 questions were crossed off, with the addition of one more question. This reducing and refining process is important to narrow down the focus of the research project. From the 6 questions that were finally left after this process, four questions made the "final cut." These four questions are the final research questions that we hope to be able to answer after completion of our research.

IMPLEMENTATION

The implementation of an online survey was used to collect data from a sample of our population. The sample was given a URL to access the survey and submit their results via the Internet to Dr. Newberry. One of the issues with using this online survey was that everything was kept anonymous; therefore, the researchers did not know who has or who has not completed the survey. I believe the use of the online survey is the best way to collect massive amounts of data that needs to be compiled. Online surveys are easy to administer, cost effective, and sure saves a lot of paper.

James

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi James,

I like the way you set the method section up in your first paragraph and then broke it down into the three sections you put forth at the beginning. The manner in which the survey was created and the thought that went into its final form are laid out well.

There is one sentence that is a bit confusing and I’ll quote it here…

“Then the questions were split into two categories: media choice/adoptions/use and andragogy and online learning.”.

Although I know what you are implying here because I am privy to the course flow, it may look to readers as though there are more than two sections. Also, with the “media choice/adoptions/use portion, the bit connected by slashes creates a large text block that looks awkward because it breaks the line wrapping between ‘media’ and ‘choice’. I’m not sure how to explain that any better, so I hope that you know what I’m getting at there. It depends on the width of the column in which it is written so off of the blog that might not even be an issue. If you made a clearer distinction between the two it would help.

I enjoy reading your writing and appreciate the clear way in which you articulate things in all of your posts. I am certain that many will benefit from viewing your methods section as they work on theirs as well.

Matt

Anonymous said...

That line actually broke on my post too. It looks like media and choice might not be one connected topic because of the distance between the two words. =) Hope that helps...

Matt

Darlene Pitman said...

James, I envy the ease with which you appear to complete these assignments, I really struggle. I got a much better idea of a well written method section by reading your post and Joe's too. As to the formatting comments, my posts frequently have odd sections of font or size or spacing that does not appear in the original word document. Even clearing all formatting doesn't help. I've decided to accept the ghosts in the machine, or in the browser interface as the case might be, and go for quality writing. Even though I participated in this process, your clarity of writing was enlightening.

Maria C. Pallares said...

hi James

Again you have done a geat job on your assignment. It was interestin to read how you managed to find the participants for the survey.
I also agree with the problems that we face when posting our work. I hate it because I would like to use a certain format, but I have to adjust to what the blog want to use.

Michele said...

James,

I always enjoy reading your post. It gives me a good idea of what I am suppose to be doing.

gordonthevet said...

I was also impressed with how you selected your participants in your survey - and I teach at a community college. I racked my brains to determine how I might select my candidates, and ended up with choosing some administrators in my district office.

It is great to have your posts to refer to before starting my assignments.

ٌRebecca said...

Hi James,Thank you for being an inspiration to us all. I read your post before starting mine, but I have to say that I did not understand it as I was feeling very confused about how to do the assignment. Once I had managed to actually DO the assignment, I came back and re-read your post.. this time I understood it and reading what you wrote showed me that I had been basically correct in my own description as well. (The one difference is that I had not mentioned the final six questions being cut down to four.)
Do you know how many people responded to your survey request? I guess there is no way to know. I like the method you chose for participant selection.
Rebecca

Bruce Rhodewalt said...

James, I try to avoid reading others' current posts before I do mine to keep from being overly influenced. Yours especially, since you seem to have a natural flair for organization.

I think I can contribute some formatting ideas to the discussion:

1) You can join terms together (a la traditional compound modifier) using hyphens. These will be "hard" hyphens and will be treated as any character: words near the ends of lines will not be broken at the hyphen.

2) There is a "soft hyphen" in the HTML spec (ampersand followed by shy;), but it should only show up when a word gets broken. *

3) Of course, there's also a non-breaking space (ampersand followed by nbsp;), which can force words not joined by a hyphen to stick together.

You could use either a hard hyphen or a non-breaking space between "media" and "choice" to force those two words to stick together. This would make about a 25-character chunk of non-breaking text which would cause some ugliness under certain conditions on certain browsers and screen widths.

Hope this helps.

Bruce


*W3C HTML 4 9.33: "Those browsers that interpret soft hyphens must observe the following semantics: If a line is broken at a soft hyphen, a hyphen character must be displayed at the end of the first line. If a line is not broken at a soft hyphen, the user agent must not display a hyphen character. For operations such as searching and sorting, the soft hyphen should always be ignored."

Joseph Ochoa said...

Hello James,
I agree that online surveys are the best way to gather data due to time constraints. Your methods section was well written.

Anonymous said...

James,

A lot of people got hung up on the formatting portion of my first post. That was really just an observation.

My main comment was regarding the way you explained what the "two categories" were. I thought that maybe from an outsider's perspective it might not have been as clear as it could have been with the use of two "and"s in the one sentence.

Your posts are high level and well written as always - it was basically the only constructive criticism I could give =P. Hope that is the way you took it.

I try to put some real content in my posts when I can and avoid the quick "way to go" comments that are frequent in this format. I'm not innocent of it myself, I just try not to...

Bruce - very interesting coding notes. I'll never remember all of that, but if I am doing stuff for the web and it presents itself, your explanations will definitely be there for me to reference. -Thanks

Matt