Theme 3 - Before

Mixed Research and Online Learning

This was an interesting read and easy to follow because it kept pretty straight to the point and concise. It was about mixed research, that is mixing qualitative and quantitative kinds of research. I thought what provoked most thought was the early parts of the paper where they briefly discussed the backgrounds of the different schools of research, and how the pragmatic mixed methods started to be explored. With it being a pretty new area they also pointed out that not a lot of researchers are trained in conducting mixed research.

The article also goes through a few steps and points to consider when developing mixed researches, and goes into a bit of detail about the different degrees of mixed research. From partially to fully-mixed. This part relates to what stage you start actually mixing and if you do it on multiple stages of the process.

This subject is something that is very practically applicable for us students who are getting closer to writing our master theses, where we will need to be able to find really good ways to conduct our investigations. At this point we might know when quantitative or qualitative methods are better to use, but I am sure that I could think of several situations where a combined method would produce the best data.

Emotional Presence, Learning and the Online Learning Environment

The article was informative, and to me it feels like an very likely thing that emotion affects learning (both in online and offline environments) so it was engaging to actually read concrete information about it.

After learning a bit about mixed research from the previous article (which I read first) it was interesting to get to go through an actual research paper using a mixed method. Though it became quite technical in the details it was at least partly familiar to me how they had used the two aspects - quantitative and qualitative sources - to conduct the research.

For our bachelors thesis me and my thesis partner used what might be classified as a partially-mixed research approach, though we did not know much about it at the time. The qualitative part of our research was based on pretty lengthy interviews, only a few, and the quantitative part was a multiple choice survey that got around 100 responses. The data from these were joined at the presentation stage of the thesis, and we built our conclusions on the combined data, but the methods did not affect each other earlier than that. With that thesis work fresh in mind it was especially interesting to read about how these authors had done theirs. 

General reflections

I think this theme and the next will probably provide a lot of practical information that will be really useful for future writing. Over the years we’ve come to know quite a lot about both qualitative and quantitative methods of various kinds through practical experience. Though I feel a bit has been missing in theoretical knowledge about them. As it is I think most of us know how to conduct, for instance, interviews and survey collection by having tried it a few time. But learning more about the subject, and ways to develop methods for this with more forethought, will no doubt lead to a better understanding on how to develop our methods to improve a great deal.