The PEDRC research methodology was organized around cycles of reflective observation, analysis, and interpretation. To start the process, researcher-participants completed weekly logs. The first log asked participants to retrospectively reflect on their experience with the rapid transition to online instruction during the spring semester. In the next six weekly logs, participants described their work, feelings about work and home, interactions with colleagues, and reflections on what the future holds. For weeks 4 to 7, a fifth question was added in to reflect on the nationwide response to George Floyd’s killing.
After five to seven weeks, individuals reviewed their own past logs to identify important themes and then met with another researcher-participant for a coding conversation. During this conversation, researcher-participants compared and contrasted their general observations and worked to create meaning around their similarities and differences. They documented their conversations in analytical memos that were structured to focus on shared and divergent themes, concrete examples, and observations on the process. The research coordinators then coded the memos from all pairs to identify important themes for the entire team to reflect on. During research meetings, research collaborative members identified and discussed promising insights and ideas that would be valuable to disseminate more broadly. The research coordinators prioritized these findings and collected surveys and specialized logs are used to provide more precise data supporting certain claims.
This basic cycle then repeated.
The goal of this initial log entry is to retrospectively reflect on your experience with the rapid transition to online instruction during the spring semester.
Tell the story of your experience with the transition to remote learning this spring. We want to know about the things that stand out in your memory now. Later in the project we will have opportunities to look back at specific emails, meeting notes, etc. to examine those in detail.
The following prompts might help you address different aspects of your experience. Feel free to write under each prompt or to write a single reflection.
Tell the story of how you were notified of the transition to online instruction. When did it happen? How were you notified of the transition? What was your level of involvement in the decision or planning for the transition?
What did you or your Center/unit do in response? What were the first priorities for your Center after the notification? What kinds of decisions, projects, programs, or services were you tasked with?
What was your personal response? Reflect on your feelings about work, home, community, and your wider context during this initial transition period? How did you manage these feelings?
How did you interact with your colleagues? What kinds of interactions did you have with colleagues in your center, other parts of the institution, and colleagues beyond your institution during this period?
The goal of this log entry is to reflect on how things are going at this point in time. The following prompts might help you address different aspects of your experience. Feel free to write under each prompt or to write a single reflection.
What is the most important or pressing work for you now? Who is directing your priorities? What does this mean about your other work?
Over the last week, what have your feelings been about work, home and your wider context. How have you managed those feelings? How have they complemented or taken away from your other priorities.
In the past week, what kinds of interactions have you had with colleagues? Colleagues in your center? Other parts of the institution? Colleagues beyond your institution?
What does the future look like right now? For you, your center, and your institution? For your family, city, and state?
Please take a few minutes to fill out details about your [rotating topics around academic unit, institution, state, programming, etc] in the shared google spreadsheet.
The goal of this log entry is to reflect on how things are going at this point in time. The following prompts might help you address different aspects of your experience. Feel free to write under each prompt or to write a single reflection.
What is the most important or pressing work for you now? Who is directing your priorities? What does this mean about your other work?
Over the last week, what have your feelings been about work, home and your wider context. How have you managed those feelings? How have they complemented or taken away from your other priorities.
In the past week, what kinds of interactions have you had with colleagues? Colleagues in your center? Other parts of the institution? Colleagues beyond your institution?
What does the future look like right now? For you, your center, and your institution? For your family, city, and state?
While the questions above may already prompted you to reflect on how George Floyd’s murder, diffferent protests, and Black lives matter movements have resonated for you, take a moment to center these. What has shaped your thoughts, emotions, and responses? How have you experienced the responses and reactions in your center/unit? At your institution? In your community? How have these events interacted with the current pandemic in your experience?
Given the enormity of the work we are doing in our centers, take some time this week to answer the following questions regarding your individual and center/unit successes (please try and answer each question so that we can compare across units).
Reflecting back on your center/units work over the past 3+ months, what do you feel has been the biggest success?
Reflecting on your own work, what do you feel has been your biggest success over the past 3+ months?
How, if at all, did your center/unit define ‘success’ as it related to supporting faculty in the transition to online instruction in March? Was ‘success’ defined implicitly or explicitly? Who defined it?
Did you feel your center/unit was successful? Why or why not?
As we work on the first story for dissemination, we would like more details of your programming as we shifted to remote educational development. Part I asks for specific details of your ‘signature course design’ related programming pre and post-COVID. Part II asks for you to describe the evolution of these programs.
Part I - Please take a few minutes to fill out details about your center or unit’s pre and post-COVID course design related programs in the shared google spreadsheet tabs. You can create a row on each tab for each specific program. We understand that you might not cover all programs and encourage everyone to focus on the most important.
Part II - Use the prompts below to help guide your writing about the evolution of your programming. You can include quotes from your previous logs if they are helpful.
Looking back, what were the most important steps your center or unit took to support the transition to remote teaching between February and May?
What are the major forms of programming, consultations, or resources that your center or unit is offering this summer to help instructors and/or teaching assistants prepare for the fall semester?
To what extent do these summer programs/resources build on practices and programs that have been offered by your center or unit pre-COVID?
To what extent were these summer programs, consultations, or resources novel for your center/unit? What critical information or principles shaped these? What relationships inside your institution were critical in developing these programs/consultations/resources? What relationships beyond your institution helped you?
The goal of this log entry is to reflect on how things are going at this point in time. The following prompts might help you address different aspects of your experience. Feel free to write under each prompt or to write a single reflection.
What is the most important or pressing work for you now? How are you determining your priorities? What does this mean about your other work?
What did your most recent “work day” look like? What did you work on? Who did you meet with? To what extent did your personal life intermingle in your work day and vice versa?
Over the last two weeks, what have your feelings been about work, home and your wider context. How have you managed those feelings? How have they complemented or taken away from your other priorities?
In the past week, what kinds of interactions have you had with colleagues? Colleagues in your center? Other parts of the institution? Colleagues beyond your institution?
What does the future look like right now? For you, your center, and your institution? For your family, city, and state?
The purpose of your analysis is to develop some general, broad themes that develop as you read through your own data. We expect this process to take you ~1 hour, so for those of you that have done qualitative analyses in the past, this is a very quick analysis of your data. The intent is that your peer conversation and documentation of that conversation form the basis of the data we will use. If we collectively decide to go back to analyze the Logs to answer other research questions, we will re-analyze these more thoroughly.
If you have not done any qualitative analysis, we hope this guide will help you through the process. First, we recommend creating a “Method Journal” document where you can document your process of analysis, record your themes, and reflect on any additional perspectives that you may have as you go through the process of analysis.
Second, we recommend inductively analyzing your data to develop a few main themes that you identify throughout your Logs. A very, very general overview of the process:
Without taking any notes, read through your last four Logs to get a holistic sense of what you wrote. Don’t skip this step!
After reading, identify 2-3 themes that you identified as most salient throughout the responses. Write down these ideas in your Method Journal with a brief description of what the theme is about.
Reread your logs and use the comment function to note where these themes were elucidated. You should not be going line by line and coding your data. You also do not need to have a comment for all parts of the data.
As you continue to read through the data, you may identify additional themes or larger ideas that connect your themes. Document any additional themes you may identify as you are commenting in your Logs and describe any larger ideas you may have in your Method Journal.
Continue to iterate your topics and themes based on your reading of the data. You may find that you have to go back and read through your data a second time, but don’t be too concerned about ensuring you capture everything.
Once you feel you have identified the most salient themes and no new ideas are developing from the data, you will be ready to discuss your final themes with your partner.
Talk about your experience writing, reviewing, and coding your logs. Document any salient points about this conversation.
What are the common themes that emerge during your discussion of your coding? For each theme. If there are important quotations that illustrate a theme include those.
What are some themes that were unique to one researcher or the other? For each theme, list relevant codes. If there are particular important examples of codes can include under the code.
In your conversation, did you develop new ideas about your experiences or identify new themes that you had not found before? Describe those here.
Any last thoughts on your conversation and this process?