Share Your SoTL Research Plan

A response to the Share Your SoTL Research Plan Activity
created by anh lam (@anhlam)

Number of views: 100

Reflective Response:
As someone with a science background, research and analyzing data is familiar to me. However I do find that researching topics within disciplines such as education may be a challenge for me because there are instances where I believe what I find may be subjective and can change based on conscious and unconscious biases. In comparison, when researching scientific methods, it is usually accompanied with quantitative data and facts.

I had a basic understanding of what SoTL is about and this module shared more insight. We have a SoTL team and I plan to reach out to them to learn more about the projects we currently have ongoing. Over the summer I will reach out to my colleague who works with faculty embarking on SoTL projects. From here I hope to hear about a project I can support with from behind the scenes before I embark on one myself. As someone who doesn’t teach, this topic is very new to me and I’d like to learn more about whether there is anything in my role that I can suggest as a SoTL project. As a novice in this area, I’d like to first support current SoTL projects with their dissemination plans and strategies utilizing my project management skills.

My research question for this project is: How can we help faculty/subject matter experts/content experts develop asynchronous material when they are coming to us with no experience?

When and before I dive into the project, I will need to review journal articles related to instructional design and working with subject matter experts. The information I need will have to be narrowed down to the type of content development. This will further inform my next steps and whether adjustements need to be made to my plan. If time allows, pre and post surveys will be designed alongside colleagues who also work with subject matter experts developing asynchronous modules. An alternative would be to collect responses during the kick-off and post-project meetings informally.

Dissemination Strategy
I’d like to share results to my team before sharing it publicly. I believe my sample will be quite small and would like to gather more data and observations before taking it publicly. When the opportunity arises, I’d like to share my findings at conferences such as EDUCAUSE or OLC.

Image:
This is going to be a journey that may change as terrain changes during a hike and I’ll need to make modifications along the way. A modification I foresee is finding a partner for this project.