Design, Delivery, and Evaluation of a Synchronous, Online Qualitative Methods Course: A Collaborative Response to COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I (Janet) describe how university mandates related to the COVID pandemic required me to teach a qualitative methods #1 class online - a learning platform with which I, an advocate of social constructivist pedagogy, was unfamiliar. The extant literature did not offer much help, but collaboration with my former student and volunteer technical expert, research assistant, Christy, proved highly successful. With Christy as a technical advisor, I was able to follow my usual course curriculum and design and support my students as they learned how to create a priori research questions as a first step to structuring an inquiry;devise simulated inquiries through problem-solving teamwork;engage in all group collaborative projects;and write weekly critiques of published inquiries that employed case studies, phenomenology, arts-based research, narrative, oral history, autoethnography and grounded theory, followed by small group discussions about each method of inquiry. As a final individual assignment, my students devised and presented a simulated inquiry followed by class members asking questions and offering their suggestions for improvement. Scholars note that traditional course evaluation surveys are not adequate for online courses (Roulston et al., 2018). Therefore, Christy and I provide students’ responses to an informal pilot end-of-semester survey we designed to ascertain their perceptions of the class. We based the survey questions on tenets of three constructs identified in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, which presents critical prerequisite factors for student understanding and satisfaction in online learning environments (Garrison, et al., 2000, 2001;Garrison and Vaughn, 2008;also see Ol pak et al., 2016). We close the chapter with an overview of our concerns and accomplishments about the course. © 2022 by Janet C. Richards, Audra Skukauskaitė and Ron Chenail.