Pivot: Moving a Hands-On Research Methods Course Online Without Losing Your Balance
By Emily Stark
The word ‘pivot’ has been used to describe the abrupt change in instruction that took place in March 2020, as my university and others across the world adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic. I think this is apt—as a dancer, I’m used to dramatic changes in movement and direction, keeping my balance the whole time. As a college professor, however, I prefer to plan out my courses in detail, and I resist making radical changes: precisely the opposite of ‘pivoting’. However, when Minnesota State University, Mankato, announced during our spring break in March 2020 that the remainder of our spring semester would be moved entirely online, we were all faced with the requirement to dramatically change our pedagogy, our instructional approaches, and throw all of our best-laid plans right out the window.
One of the courses that I had to adapt was a hands-on research methods course, required of all psychology majors. In this course, students design and conduct surveys and experiments, learn how to use SPSS to analyze data, and write APA-style research papers. I’ve taught this course a number of times, and always felt that although I enjoy online teaching in general, I would never want to put research methods online, due to how much individual work and face-to-face explanation and trouble-shooting it requires of the students. Of course, now I had no choice. We were just getting ready to design 2x2 experiments, and I had to figure out how to describe that process to students, empower them to collect data virtually, teach them how to run a Univariate ANOVA in SPSS, and get them comfortable with the concepts of main effects and interactions—and with two fewer weeks left in the semester to accomplish these goals. All the while everyone teaching online had to consider students widely varying access to technology and wifi as well as the entire population’s sheer stress and panic of coping with an unprecedented plague.
My first step was to decide what to cut: I took out the oral presentation component of this project, thinking that if I could just get students to a fully written research paper, that would be more than enough to meet my course learning objectives. I also cut lectures on quasi-experimental and within-subjects designs, focusing the remainder of the semester on the projects they had to develop and complete, and the underlying terminology and concepts related to experimental research. This process helped me reduce my lectures—I created the remaining course content to both step students through their projects while also introducing and explaining research design concepts.
Deciding what to cut can be the most difficult aspect of making this kind of change—most professors have already designed their courses to include all necessary work and cover the relevant concepts, so trying to cut information can feel overwhelming or that students will miss out on important learning. However, our semester had been shortened by two weeks to give professors more time to transfer courses online, and I felt it would be deeply unfair to my students (as well as to myself) to just cram all the remaining content into the shortened time span of the course. Taking a careful look at my course learning objectives helped me understand what was truly essential, and what could be removed under these extreme circumstances.
Course Components Post-Pivot
Screen-capture videos to explain research design concepts and demonstrate SPSS analyses
Detailed lists via course announcements to focus students on what needed to be done each week
Short assignments to double-check that everyone was on the right track before they got too far along
Required Zoom meetings with students to look at their data files and analysis processes
Multiple paper drafts to answer questions throughout the process
Overall Recommendations
Always start with the learning objectives. I knew this from numerous workshops on backwards design, and this really helped me focus on what I needed to do to successfully finish the course. I felt comfortable cutting topics and re-focusing around the final course project, because that aligned with what I had previously identified as the core learning objectives for this class.
Ask for help! Our IT department was amazing at ensuring that students could access programs like Qualtrics to collect their data, or SPSS to analyze their files. Students were also able to get help with access to laptops, wifi, or other community resources if needed. As a professor, it was useful to model this type of problem-solving for students—I couldn’t directly answer most of their technology questions, but I could show them how to connect with IT, and the students were always able to get their problems resolved.
Balance flexibility with maintaining expectations. These weren’t ideal conditions for anyone and remembering that students were struggling with this change far more than I was helped me to keep perspective. Was a perfectly written results section in APA style with all the right letters italicized really what I wanted my students to spend their time on? Or, was the goal to have them show that they could figure out what they could learn from their data, and explain that to a reader? I learned that letting go of some of the expectations that I usually have for the papers in this class didn’t result in disaster—on the contrary, students appreciated the flexibility and were more likely to work hard to reach course goals when they understood that I was trying to be understanding and accommodating.
Overall, I can’t yet reflect too much on ‘what I’ve learned’ from this experience—I’m still living it. We’re waiting to know if classes will be fully online for fall semester 2020, or beyond, and the entire landscape of higher education and the world itself is changing in unpredictable ways. One thing I will take with me, however, is the immense pride I have in my students—every single one stepped up under far less-than-ideal circumstances to submit creative and complete work. When so much is currently uncertain, I can trust that my students and colleagues will adapt successfully, and that gives me a little bit more hope in our future.