关键信息
关于内容
How does ‘society’ function? What makes ‘culture’? These are crucially important questions that can help us to understand the most pressing issues that human beings face today – but how do we answer them? This course will explore the techniques and approaches used by researchers to answer difficult questions about the social world.
In this course, we’re going to explore:
- The kinds of methods researchers tend to adopt
- The contexts in which certain research methods are used
- The benefits, drawbacks and ethical implications of research
This course isn’t a practical or technical guide to doing research. Rather, it offers a way for us to think deeply about what methods are, and what they allow us to achieve.
When you complete this course, we want you to be critical users of research – and that means having the ability to always question the application of methods, and to hold ourselves to account as researchers and scholars.
That not only makes our research better, it also foregrounds the things that are most exciting and interesting about methods.
We’ve designed this course to provide you with a unique opportunity to develop your understanding of methods. This course is part of the Masters in Digital Education programme at the University of Edinburgh. You will study alongside students who are enrolled at the University and who are working towards a postgraduate qualification. By joining us you’ll get a sense of what it is like to study on our programme.
The Masters in Digital Education has built up a reputation over the years for critical engagement in our field, and it is this way of learning that we want to foreground in this course. Introduction to Social Research Methods will be about developing a rounded understanding of methods, and their underlying assumptions and values.
- The kinds of methods researchers tend to adopt
- The contexts in which certain methods are used
- The benefits, drawbacks and ethical implications involved in particular methods
- Critical perspective on quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques
- Critically analyse published research on methods
课程大纲
- Surveys
- Discourse analysis
- Learning Analytics
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Ethnography
- Social Network Analysis (SNA)
- Experimental intervention
- Visual and image analysis
- Critical perspectives on quantitative data analysis
- Critical perspectives on qualitative data analysis
教师
Jeremy Knox
Dr
The University of Edinburgh
Rory Ewins
Dr
The University of Edinburgh
内容设计师
平台
EdX est une plateforme d'apprentissage en ligne (dite FLOT ou MOOC). Elle héberge et met gratuitement à disposition des cours en ligne de niveau universitaire à travers le monde entier. Elle mène également des recherches sur l'apprentissage en ligne et la façon dont les utilisateurs utilisent celle-ci. Elle est à but non lucratif et la plateforme utilise un logiciel open source.
EdX a été fondée par le Massachusetts Institute of Technology et par l'université Harvard en mai 2012. En 2014, environ 50 écoles, associations et organisations internationales offrent ou projettent d'offrir des cours sur EdX. En juillet 2014, elle avait plus de 2,5 millions d'utilisateurs suivant plus de 200 cours en ligne.
Les deux universités américaines qui financent la plateforme ont investi 60 millions USD dans son développement. La plateforme France Université Numérique utilise la technologie openedX, supportée par Google.
