Theme 6 - Qualitative and case study research

This week I chose the media technology research paper From Moodle to Facebook: Exploring students’ motivation and experiences in online communities by Liping Deng and Nicole Judith Tavares from the journal Computers & Education. The qualitative method used in the paper was individual interviews with 14 pre-service teachers. The interviews lasted between 30 and 80 min, and both authors conducted most of the interviews together. The paper examines the student teachers’ experiences with and perceptions of using Facebook and Moodle. The purpose was to see which factors have bigger impact on students’ engagement in online discussions on the two online platforms. The paper investigates why they were not actively involved in voluntary online discussions on Moodle, and how they were encouraged to voluntarily participate in online discussions on both Facebook and Moodle. The usage data from Moodle was collected and analyzed, but the data from the Facebook group that the students also used was only collected in the interviews when the student teachers gave them the information since the researchers didn’t have any access to the Facebook group.

The benefits of using qualitative methods are that you get very specific information, which can be valuable for certain topics and types of research. In this case they used interviews and interviewed 14 persons that were in the target group of the research. The interviews were explorative which means that they had a few topics and guiding questions for the participants to answer and from there they would rather explore what was going on on the online platforms rather than expect anything and ask already decided questions.

The limitations are that it’s impossible to generalize the information that they got during the interviews. This case is only possible to apply to that group of student teachers, since they all were from the same university in Hong Kong. They were all part of the same online community on both Facebook and Moodle. To improve the results I would have interviewed both students and teachers to get both sides. It would have been interesting to see what the teachers did to encourage the students to use the discussion board on Moodle, if they did so.

Case study

A case study is research method with the aim to give a deeper knowledge of what the research is about. The basic idea is to collect empirical data with both qualitative and quantitative methods for example interviews, questionnaires and focus groups. There are numerous of aims with the use of case studies; providing description, testing or generating theory.

I chose a paper called “Structuring the discourse on social networks for learning: Case studies on blogs and microblogs” in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. The paper was about blogs and microblogs and how they can be used in education to improve student interaction. In the case study in this paper the authors used questionnaires with both open and closed questions. They interviewed some participant sand collected data from the applications for the blogs and microblogs.