Improving the Pedagogy of Research Methodology through Learning Analytics

Abstract

Teaching research methodology is complicated because students often come from a wide range of disciplines, with different prior knowledge, diverse interests and expectations, as such, employing a pedagogical approach that appeals to all students is difficult to achieve. Subsequently, students experience many challenges when learning research methods, to the extent that courses on research methods are increasingly becoming unpopular. The current article presents the design, development and testing of iMethod; a digital learning environment for students to access various forms of online resources (e.g. text, video and audio) on research methods. iMethod tracks and captures student learning analytics, and present the teacher with a dashboard on students’ learning trajectories, to enable teachers to identify challenges students face in learning research methods. The learning analytics harvested from iMethod were used to inform the design of a pedagogical programme—analytics and research methods (ARM) that brings together a variety of workshops to support student learning. The article contributes to the growing need to improve the quality of teaching research methods courses.