Taken the current situation, many university students face the challenge of conducting their research projects to complete their degree programmes. This is why, this semester, I encourage my MA seminar students to plan and conduct online studies. E-interviews will surely be part of their projects. What are e-interviews. Online interviews are about the use of online and mobile communication tools to collect data. E-interviews can be conducted with one or more participants (focus groups) to investigate behaviours, culture, practices, attitudes or experiences that take place in-person, online or are technology-mediated, such as in online conferencing spaces, video calling , virtual worlds or games. Why do e-interviews. We all experience life events in individual ways, we make sense of our lives differently and interpret these events through the lens of our identity, culture, memory, etc. In general, by interviewing people, we can increase our understanding of the complexity of human experience because we gain access to other people’s reflections, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. Through interviews, researchers can describe experience(s) and context with more detail. With regard to CALL (computer-assisted language learning) research and practice, we can better understand and describe the new and complex realities of foreign/second language learning and teaching. Owing to the availability of online and mobile communication tools, interviews can be conducted “anytime, anywhere” to collect data. Rationale for the use of technology to collect data. The use of technology to collect data can be viewed from three perspectives: 1) technology is a medium for communication with participants, 2) technology is a setting (for, example, electronic research environments), and 3) technology is a phenomenon. As to the use of technology as a medium for communication with participants, it is used to reduce or eliminate barriers that make in-person interviews impossible or difficult, and to enable access to more study participants (such as internationally-based, or participants with disabilities). Next, the use of digital tools is justified when data collection takes place in an online community, a social media site, a web conferencing space, a virtual world, or a game. Our focus is then to investigate aspects of online or in-person experiences. Finally, when technology is studied as a phenomenon, we aim to understand and analyse participants’ use, activities, behaviours with this technology and researchers may need to use the same type of digital tool to collect data; for example, a study about social media is conducted using social media. When not to do e-interviews. There are a few situations in which conducting e-interviews will not be a good idea. Most importantly, this is when you need to observe your interviewees or the research setting during the interview. When you need a private setting to collect sensitive information, online interviewing is not a good idea, either, as others could be present and eavesdrop on your conversation. Selecting ICT tools for e-interviews. While selecting technology, researchers need to take into consideration a number of matters. First, they need to account for their study participants and issues related to tool accessibility and the ease of its use. Next, they need to consider the kind of data that they want to collect: verbal, textual, or visual. They should think about their own time and skills and, finally, the timing of communication with their interviewees: synchronous or asynchronous. Text-based communication can be enabled by the following technology: blog, email, forum, text message or chat (social media sites), wiki. Multiple-channelled communication is possible via shared applications (such as whiteboards, Google Docs, Google Forms, Padlet), video conferencing or video call (Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype), virtual world (Second Life), podcasts (SoundCloud) or vodcasts. Tools for interviewing, recording and transcribing include: Otter Voice Notes, VoiceIn, Otranscribe, Express Scribe. This post is based on: Salmons, J. (2015). Qualitative online interviews: Strategies, design, and skills. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. For more information on e/interviews, you can explore other books: Salmons, J. E. (2016). Doing qualitative research online. Los Angeles: Sage. Richards, K., (2009). Interviews. In J. Heigham & R. Croker (Eds.), Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics: A Practical Introduction (pp. 182-199). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Or take an online course: Qualitative Research Methods: Conversational Interviewing Having done all these things, watch this film :)
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As a supervisor of MA theses, I ensure that my students get familiar with various writing strategies, academic discourse, etc. However, I also recognise that these students – novice EFL (English as a Foreign Language) professionals – need learning opportunities in interaction with other members of our professional and disciplinary community.
I cater for this need with the use of Twitter. Thanks to this social medium, my students can learn from experienced professionals and researchers worldwide. What is more, they can be a meaningful contribution to the community: they can share what they learn as they read recent research literature for their proposed MA research projects. I introduce my students to Twitter in three phases, as part of my Research Writing Moodle course. Phase 1. I invite my students to consider the use of Twitter. First, they read this blog post about using Twitter as a teacher: 10 Tips for Teachers Using Twitter Having read the post, the students reflect on their thoughts and feelings. I ask them how ready they are to interact with the inter/national community of EFL teachers through this social medium. They respond in the Research Writers’ Forum on Moodle. Phase 2. The students reconsider the use of Twitter as teachers-researchers. They look at my Twitter profile and my posts to see how I use Twitter to interact with the inter/national community. I encourage them to explore some hashtags, such as #edtech, #onlineteaching, etc. I ask them to reflect on their thoughts and feelings at this stage. Has their perception of how they can interact with the EFL community changed? Again, they reflect on this in the Research Writers’ Forum. In their responses they can ask me anything they would like to know before they become Twitter users. Phase 3. This phase is optional. I ask my students to create or modify their Twitter accounts to be used for professional purposes. They are asked to follow 15 accounts of EFL researchers and educators, I also provide them a list of accounts in case they find it difficult to decide who to follow. Next, they post four tweets - one tweet per week - with a summary of an article they read for their MA thesis proposals and include a class hashtag. If you would like to know more about the use of Twitter in higher education, you can read this article: “Should We Ask Students to Tweet? Perceptions, Patterns, and Problems of Assigned Social Media Participation” by Daniel G. Krutka From early stages of their degree programme, MA seminar students desperately need a sense of direction and support to be able to move ahead with their research projects. In English-medium instructional contexts (like English Studies in Poland), supervisors' feedback on both the content of their planned research AND language (which is a foreign language for them) helps make progress. Here is how I tackle this challenge - fully online this semester - in my Research Writing Moodle course. 1. MA seminar. I created a Moodle forum dedicated to the development of content for MA thesis proposals and called it “MA seminar”. The students created Google Docs entitled “MA thesis proposal e-portfolio” and shared the links in this forum. Each week they complete tasks that engage them in planning research and developing content for their projects so that they are able to conduct their studies next semester. I give feedback on students' ideas directly in their Google Docs. Having a forum with all these links is very convenient. 2. Academic Writing. Similarly, I created a Moodle forum focused on the improvement of writing and called it “Academic Writing”. The students created Google Docs entitled “Academic Writing e-portfolio” and shared the links in this forum. Weekly tasks engage them in improving English and developing writing strategies so that they can write their MA theses according to academic norms and conventions. I assess students’ work and give them feedback, directly in their Google Docs, on language, text organisation and content. 3. Research Writers’ Forum. Finally, in order to keep track of students’ problems and to react to these problems, I created a Moodle forum, called it “Research Writers’ Forum” and generated a thread “My burning question/s”. I invited my students to voice concerns there, ask questions, etc. I respond to these issues and keep the dialog going with each student. Importantly, apart from my support, MA seminar students also need to interact with various members of the professional community of practice. In my next post I will explain how I enable this in my Research Writers course this semester.
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