When Dawn McGuckin, Deb Tsagris, and I developed a new psychology GNED course, we made sure that UDL/accessibility was central to our planning. We made pedagogical choices which we thought would benefit student learning (based on the literature from education and the cognitive sciences) and were pretty happy with our course. It ran for a couple of years and then we wondered, is there actually any empirical evidence that student are enjoying this course, and perhaps more importantly for us, what elements from our course did students see as better and worse than the other online asynchronous courses they’ve taken (now that they’ve had plenty of experience with online learning, for better or for worse). We knew, because of the way we had designed the course, that mid-way through students provided us with feedback in a stop-start-continue-better-worse format where we asked them exactly this. So, we had data from a past semesters, and wanted to do research on those data. Our next step was to apply to the REB to use these secondary data for our research purposes. The form is pretty short/simple compared to a full REB application (see my previous posts on how to complete this form here: Part 1 and Part 2). After REB approval, we downloaded our data, combined it, and analysed it in the way we described in our REB application. And then wrote up our results as a research article. We’ve sent it out for review and hope it will be published soon! Easy-peasy! 😉 I that hope reading about this example inspires you to think about your own secondary data and the research possibilities that it invites!
If there is anything I can do to support your research or if you have suggestions for me in my role as Research Coordinator, please reach out via email or pop in to my virtual “office hours” on Fridays from 12:30-1:30pm in my Whereby room.
