A proposal

Here is a rough, unfinished outline of a proposal.

Purpose of the study:
To investigate educational culture and processes conducive to student-centred learning.
To investigate students as learning designers, focusing on the balance between structure and flexibility.

Relevant background literature

Research questions or hypotheses
The educational culture permits or constrains particular ways of learning. A move towards student-centred learning is supported or constrained by the general educational culture, largely composed of the personal experiences of students and teachers.
How do teachers and students perceive tasks based on new approaches such as problem-based learning? What are the ways they make sense of what they are asked to do and how do they negotiate new roles?
How are students enabled as designers of learning?
In designing learning beyond performing for exams, how do you measure the effectiveness of learning that aims to improve 'soft skills' or graduate attributes?

Definitions of key terms:
Student-centred learning:
Affordances:
Sense-making:
Educational culture:
Structured learning:
Flexible learning:

Research methodology:
The approach is to use observation and interviews with both staff and students over a number of faculties, courses and tasks, focusing on sense-making.
While primarily a qualitative approach, the research will also include quantitative data in the form of surveys and possibly assessment results.

The research will be based on personal experience as an online educational designer, working in collaboration with tertiary education teachers. This will be supplemented by a review of current practice across other tertiary institutions, as well as case studies from other institutions where possible.
Examples of intitiatives that might be used in the research include: use of concept mapping in an  introductory course in astronomy; a first year computer science course that removes most assessment items, using a collaborative wiki and reward points for student-curated notes and task and project feedback; student-generated quizzes, using a tool such as PeerWise (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz).

Significance of the research:
Increasingly, tertiary education is applying more student-centred approaches to learning design. This research aims to bring together many experiences and designs to create a common picture of how  initiatives are received and improved.
Classes in tertiary education are growing in size. Academic staff are under pressure to both maintain research output as well as cope with more students. Students are dissatisfied with access to staff and frequency and timeliness of feedback (). How can student-centred learning respond to these pressures and demands?

Ethical considerations:
As the research is both observational and interview-based, it will need to pass an ethics approval process and gain permission from subjects.

Timetable for the research:
The research will be conducted within part-time study, so it will be possible to cover at least four years of course design, application and re-design.

Anticipated problems and limitations:
The research will be necessarily limited by the needs and inclinations of academic teacher partners. This is not a significant problem as the research aims to be well grounded in practice, so the vagaries of learning design are part of the study. It assumes continuing employment by the researcher in online educational design.

Resources required for the research:
There are no major resource requirements anticipated for the study. The research will be conducted alongside professional activities.


Bibliography:

Appendices: