Project#6 Reflection &Objectives Addressed

Project#6: Observation Notes

Objectives Addressed: 1, 4, 5, & 7

This project was submitted for ETR 597 in the Spring 2015 semester. The goals of this

project were to perform tasks in educational research that are related to educational technology

such as investigating the intersections between trends of technology and learning that is based on

use of technological tools. My submitted assignment was the result of a seven-week observation

work, which was submitted on a weekly basis. I practiced in many educational research tasks and

I learned from them. The Coursera MOOC course, which I observed was a Chemistry course in

which the students were asked to interact with the course components by posting comments,

asking questions, and discussing course materials depending on their weekly course content. For

example, for the accomplishment of week three they are asked to post questions, discuss Atoms

& Electronic Structure lectures, work on exercise and practice problems, and take a quiz at the

end of the week/unit. The students also have an opportunity to participate in a discussion forum,

where they can exchange questions and answers about the course and the materials to reinforce

their learning and their attainment. They were also encouraged to use this forum to get help with

potential difficulties in the lectures, assignments, grading rubrics, and other course materials.

Grading was calculated on two criteria, namely unit-by-unit assessments (75%), and final

assessment (25%). Students who earned 70% or greater in the overall course would receive a

Statement of Accomplishment certificate. Students who earned a minimum of 85% in the course

would receive a Statement of Accomplishment with Distinction certificate. It was a ten-week

course with seven units, and each unit is intended to be completed in a week with the exception

of Unit 1: The Atom and its Electronic Structure Activities, Unit 5: Stoichiometry, and Unit 7:
Thermochemistry, which were distributed over 2 weeks all together. My experience included an

evaluation of the course activities, which included videos of lectures, worked examples,

demonstrations, practice problems with solutions, an assessment, and a discussion board. The

focus of our research group was on the interaction in online MOOC courses, including student-

instructor interaction, student-student interaction, student-material interaction. My work

concentrated on the weekly observations, in which I had to evaluate the learners’ all types of

interaction and report my notes to the research group at the end of the week (i. e. on Thursday). I

really benefited from this independent research class, as I learned to conduct qualitative

observations of online materials and Web-based inter-face content for the first time in my career.

The project also involved communicating with my research group and having meeting for

discussing the issues related to interaction in the MOOC courses and their literature, and so my

communication and presentation skills were also improving during this class.

I felt that the class was beneficial because it connected research and educational technology

subjects, and so it was an opportunity for me to apply knowledge from ETT classes to research

and assessment activities. In addition, combining research investigation with online education

can guide designers of technological instruction to serve users such as faculty, educators,

instructors, students, librarians, counselors, school staff, and parents to benefit from educational

websites and online courses. According to educational technology MOOC courses are a

completely new trend, which stands in need of exploration and investigation in order to identify

factors and principles that can enhance education in general.

I learned many techniques of observing web-based instruction. My evaluation and

observation skills were improving as I moved on the timeline of the course and so I became

really confident that I would be able to employ qualitative research instrument of observation
and interviews so professionally and easily. Conducting the observation was a real hands-on

practice for improving my qualitative data collection techniques, which I would need in my

future career as an educator and a researcher. Therefore, this is project was a valuable

opportunity for me to develop my research knowledge as an educational technology specialist to

be able to conduct research related to my field of study in the future.

In conclusion, my gains from this project show evidence that I have satisfied the following

objectives of the MS-ERE program:

• Design and/or select appropriate assessment or evaluation tools for a given educational

problem

What I learned from this project reflects evidence of meeting this objective in terms of

gaining design and select techniques of observing and evaluation to assess problems related to

web-based education. Improvements of my evaluation and observation skills show that I became

able to select and employ the appropriate qualitative observation and interviews tools for

studying educational issues.

• Conduct a study pertaining to an educational research problem or phenomenon

Conducting the observation was a real practice that is related to educational research

domains. A qualitative study design would normally require from me the application of

qualitative data collection procedures, which means that my experience of observations and

interviews will trickle down on my work as a researcher in my field of education.

• Demonstrate effective communication skills by presenting and defending a research

project

Working on this project involved communicating with my research group and having

meetings for discussing the issues related to interaction in the MOOC courses and their literature.
Therefore, my experience a student in this class has impacted my communication and

presentation skills, so as to achieve the objective that requires communicative abilities for

presenting and defending research methods, results, and conclusions.

• Distinguish between ethical and unethical behavior when conducting educational

research or evaluation

This is project provided me with an opportunity to distinguish between ethical and

unethical behavior when conducting educational research or evaluation. As I was working on the

literature synthesis, the web-based platform observations, and the online interviews with

participants in distant locations, I developed knowledge related to ethical conduct issues. My

experience as an educational researcher allowed me to learn about issues such as copyright,

consent forms, voluntary participation and IRB permissions, etc.