By Alana and Anh
Participating in the international collaborative project UGPN, we were well aware of the challenges presented by technologies and time differences. Therefore, we found it essential to further investigate this issue in the hope of coming up with some suggestions that could enhance the online learning experience for future students who may find themselves in a similar situation.
- Throughout the research process, we find it is of paramount importance to gather and incorporate primary research data into our study to gain an understanding of how students are currently interacting. In the beginning, studying resources and data that have been performed by other researchers on relevant topics allows us to establish and build hypotheses that we would test using questionnaires and interviews. In particular, we assumed that social presence such as video, voice, and asynchronous comment has a positive relationship with students’ motivation. Of 20 responses, 50% felt neutral about the effect of those elements, 30% feel moderately motivated and 15% admitted there is a significantly positive relationship. Therefore, reference to other sources validate our findings.
- Journalist reporting and research papers are helpful when it comes to learning how to write in a persuasive manner. We learned to interpret and represent our key findings from the original data, as well as constructing an engaging piece of writing.
Were we given another chance to re-perform the study, we would look to perform more interviews with BCM212 students from international campuses to gain a broader understanding of their perspectives for managing collaboration on points previously discussed.
It should be noted that the researchers do have quite different backgrounds, and therefore a different view on why certain outcomes in our study were the case. While the differences in background contributed to the different views, it did assist in broadening the other’s view of the research findings during our meetings. We believe that our ability to work well with one another was a direct result of these differences, as we were each able to bring a new perspective to the forefront to question and surmise the initial research findings.
everything alana 