The academic profession generally comprises three tasks, namely a) teaching the next generation of academics, b) doing research to generate new knowledge, and c) transferring that knowledge to society through public outreach activities. Even though these three tasks are understood to be interacting and even complimentary, for example through a research-based teaching approach, this research project focuses on academics’ teaching task. Central here is the concept of teaching quality in an ever-more digitalized higher education context. However, our project does not aim to externally evaluate university educators’ teaching quality. Instead, we are interested in educators’ own personal, and very subjective, point of view on how digitalization in higher education has impacted their teaching quality. This research aim will particularly guide our project’s second sub-study.
We will engage university educators in an activity that will allow them to provide their viewpoint by individually sorting and rank-ordering a number of predetermined written statements about the relationship between digitalization and teaching quality. This activity is known as Q sorting and represents the main data collection exercise in Q methodology, which is known to be suitable for investigating often unconscious and hardly accessible subjectivity.
In order for this methodological approach to function, Q researchers need to follow a range of steps visible in the figure below. As we are still in the early phase of our project, we are currently working on the data collection instrument construction (stage 1).
We need to thoughtfully and carefully construct a sortable set of items, called Q sample. To do that, we are presently developing a concourse about the ways teaching quality might have been impacted by digitalization in higher education. A concourse is a collection of items pertaining to a given theme, taken from a range of sources. This study’s concourse will draw from research literature (see sub-study 1 in this project), our own pilot studies from the Corona Crash Course project, and our own experience as educational developers. Importantly, we intend to also include statements by university educators, which brings me to the “ask” of this blog post.
Please comment this blog post by responding to two questions:
- How do you define high quality teaching?
- According to you, how has the digitalization impacted your teaching quality?
Adrian Lundberg