Designing and Teaching Your Modules

The first, third, and fourth sessions of each instructional day at IQMR are reserved for your modules. Each session is 90 minutes long. Thus, you will have 270 minutes of instruction time each day. The time is yours to allocate as you see fit among lectures, exercises, questions, and so on. That said, we have a few suggestions deriving from module evaluations from previous Institutes (see under “Evaluation” on the Instructor Information landing page for details on the evaluation of instrucors) and from guidance offered by the IQMR Advisory Board.

Instruction and Engagement

IQMR module evaluations from previous Institutes, and the literature on teaching research methods, highlight the utility of “active learning” techniques. Active learning entails “instructional activities involving students doing things and thinking about what they are doing” (Bonwell and Eison, 1991, p. 2). Active learning is widely considered by scholars of learning sciences and education theory to be an effective pedagogical technique that facilitates skills acquisition and generates student interest (National Research Council, 2000; Hmelo-Silver & Rehak, 2017). In line with these perspectives, scholars have found that using active learning to teach qualitative research methods in various disciplines yields clear benefits (e.g., Reinschmidt et al. 2018, Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020).

Accordingly, we encourage you to minimize the amount of time that you purely lecture, and offer participants chances to interact and use the methods you are teaching as much as you can. Including hands-on / practical components in your modules will keep participants engaged and help them to internalize what you are teaching them.

Including time for questions is another excellent way to encourage interaction and engagement by students. It is important to carefully guide these discussions toward questions of general interest to all participants. If you are open to speaking with students between or after the day’s sessions conclude, please tell this directly to the participants in your module. Participants may be reluctant to approach you individually to ask about something if you do not specifically indicate that you are open to their doing so.

In addition, we ask that you decide, and include in the description of your module sequence, your policy on students jumping in and out of your module sequence. IQMR’s default policy is that participants follow the module sequences they elected to take prior to the Institute, and do not jump in and out of module sequences. If your policy is different it’s important for both us and participants to know. Allowing participants more flexibility in arranging their IQMR experience can be very beneficial for them when it is pedagogically possible (e.g., the four days of the fieldwork module sequence are designed to each stand by themselves).

Instructional Themes

As you design your module sequence, the individual modules, and their individual sessions, we ask that you consider including a few themes that are important to all kinds of research

• [Research ethics]{.underline} – Research ethics are important to keep in mind throughout the research cycle – from the formulation of the research question all the way to deciding how to present findings to the research community as well as a wider audience. While research ethics may be particularly important when working with human participants, they are important in the conduct of all kinds of research. The more researchers have thought about their core ethical commitments, the more easily they will find navigating the ethical challenges and dilemmas that often arise in research.

  • What are the particular types of ethical dilemmas that scholars conducting the kinds of research that you are teaching are likely to encounter?
  • What questions should scholars ask themselves in resolving those dilemmas?
  • What resources are available to them?
• [Technology]{.underline} – New types of technologies are being developed all the time to facilitate research, or at least that is the idea.
  • What kinds of tools and technology have existed, or are being created, related to the kinds of methods that you are teaching?
  • How might the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) affect the conduct of the kind of research you are discussing?
  • What are the benefits, risks, and challenges of using different technologies when conducting research of the type you are teaching?
• [Transparency]{.underline} – With the evolution of technology, and growing concern about research integrity in the social sciences, new strategies and mechanisms for making research transparent – sharing the empirical evidentiary basis of research, and clearly specifying how that evidence was gathered and analyzed, and doing so in ethical, legal, and logistically feasible ways – have emerged.
  • What transparency strategies are particularly apt for the kinds of research about which you are teaching (and which are not)?
  • How can those strategies be used while still observing ethical and legal constraints?
  • What norms about research transparency exist and/or are emerging?

Assigning Readings and Interaction between Readings and Instruction

The hope and expectation is that IQMR participants will complete all assigned readings prior to arriving in Syracuse. Doing so will enable them to spend the time outside of the module sessions reflecting, interacting and networking with other participants and instructors, perhaps reading their colleagues’ research designs, and making sure they are in top shape for the next day.

We also very much want participants to do the readings that you assign, and want you to be able to rely on their having done so. It is also the case that many IQMR participants are quite pressed for time between finishing the semester at their home institution and coming to Syracuse.

Accordingly, we ask that you assign as required reading a reasonable amount of reading that participants ought to be able to complete in the weeks leading up to IQMR – keeping in mind that they also need to complete the reading for the other four or five module sequences that they will take.

We also encourage you to create a robust recommended reading list for each module session so students who are very interested in the material know where to go to learn more. This list should include what you consider important works, but with no expectation that students will read them in advance of the Institute.

We also hope that you will be intentional about how readings and instruction interact. If you have assigned a reasonable amount of reading, your lectures should be able to build on the readings, asking questions about them, and critically engaging with them. Past evaluations suggest that students react negatively to lectures simply repeating the readings.

An alternate approach is to assign very little reading and have the lectures step in for the readings.