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to materials pageWhen, in January-March 2003, we piloted the web-based course and the investigative instruments to be used with our students, we had not completed constructing the course. So we taught the poetry and prose sections using web-based workshops and then taught the drama section of the course in a more traditional workshop mode. This structure for the pilot course is inevitably reflected in the form and timing of the pilot course questionnaires, which will therefore need adjustment before the main investigation begins in January 2004. We will post the adjusted questionnaires on this discussion site when we have produced them, later in the year, so that collaborators can base their own questionnaires on ours if they want to.
The following information will be helpful in relation to the questionnaires below:
Students were given time to fill in the questionnaires during the workshops in which they were distributed. The questionnaires were collected in at the end of the workshop. This ensured a high return rate.
The initial questionnaire was used to ascertain the attitudes, feelings and level of experience of students as they began the course. We will probably replicate this questionnaire with relatively little change, as it seemed to work pretty well.
The mid-course questionnaire was timed so that students received it at the beginning of the first workshop on drama (the section of the course that was not web-based) so that they could reflect on their whole experience on the web-based part of the course. This meant that it was distributed in Week 7 of a 10-week course. It is likely that when we run the whole course in web-based fashion we will distribute the mid-course questionnaire a bit earlier (say, at the end of Week 5). We may also want to alter the questions, but probably not very much.
The end-of course questionnaire was distributed and collected in during the last workshop of the course. We will probably repeat this timing next year, though there is always a tendency for some students to disappear a day or two early at the end of term, and so there is an argument for a slightly earlier distribution to increase the number of questionnaires completed. The prompts on this questionnaire will need more revision than the others as, in part, this questionnaire asked the pilot group students to compare the web-based and more traditional sections of their course.
We used the information gained from the questionnaires (as well as informal observations from class experience and student discussion) to help us decide on the areas we wanted to explore in the student interviews and focus group discussions.
The questionnaires that collaborators use do not have to follow ours slavishly. They should be adapted to take proper account of local conditions. We are happy to discuss issues concerning the questionnaires (and the interviews and focus group discussions) by email or on the discussion site for collaborators.
Pilot investigation questionnaires:
Main experiment (2003-4) questionnaires and analysis: