Implementation of Methods

Planning for the semi-structured interviews was a complicated process, mainly the group interviews. Participant students were residing in varied time zones, and grouping them to do synchronous interviews was a challenge. To deal with this, student participants were asked to provide their Skype names and three or four timings that suite their schedules. Then a table of the varied possible timings of all student participants was developed. Afterwards further emailing was done to ask for a few amendments with two or three of the participants, and the schedule for the group interviews was ready. Of course this resulted in doing some interviews in odd hours for the researcher; 3:00 am for example, with participants at the far-flung ends of the world. Four semi-structured group interviews were planned, each of three participant students. However, with two of the group interviews one of the participants didn’t make it. That resulted in having two group interviews with two participants each, and two group interviews with three participants each. The group interviews with two participants each were of two females, a male and a female, while the ones with three participants each were of two males and a female, and three females. As can be seen, the concern of the researcher was to be considerate to the time zone rather than to the distribution of males and females. With the individual interviews the process was less complicated.

Mainly the questions of the group interviews addressed student participants’ feelings towards their experiences in the programme and their views about how to improve the programme. Key questions of the group interviews were:

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 How do you describe your learning experience in ’the programme’, in terms of your interaction with other learners and with your tutors?

 In terms of social interaction and the ability to control your learning: what changes would you make to the programme in order to improve this?

Each student participant was given an opportunity to respond to each question as a member of the group. Follow up questions, such as; ‘what do you think of this suggestion?’, were asked to keep participants engaged in the interview.

The group interviews aimed at helping student participants remember their learning and social experiences in the programme and reflect on them through a social context. Student participants’ responses about the suggestions for improvement implied some reconsidering of questions in the second round of semi-structured interviews; i.e. the individual interviews.

The protocol for the individual semi-structured interviews was informed by a

questionnaire developed by Garrison and Akyol (2013) to measure metacognition and the CoI questionnaire, mainly the part about social presence (see Akyol, Vaughan and Garrison (2011), pp:244-246). Questions addressed students' metacognition and their perspective of how their social presence has contributed to their individual and shared metacognition. Nonetheless, the approach used was less direct and more flexible when compared to the approach used in Garrison and Akyol (2013). Their questionnaire was composed of three parts; Knowledge of Cognition, (KC), Monitoring of Cognition (MC) and Regulation of Cognition (RC) (Garrison & Akyol, 2013). The KC part, for instance, has “I know my strengths as a learner… my weaknesses as a learner”, “I have good critical thinking skills… good problem solving skills”, and “I know what factors may enhance my thinking and learning… my motivational state…opportunities of success… existing knowledge…” (p.86). In the MC part, a certain item was given much attention in the interview, “I pay attention to other course participants’ ideas/understandings/

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comments” (p.86). However, it was thought that participants might be tempted to give positive responses if the items of the questionnaire were used directly. Rather, in the individual semi- structured interview, participant students were invited to evaluate their learning experience, by discussing both positive and negative aspects of it: ‘How did your interaction with other

learners and tutors in the programme impact your learning? Can you provide incidences where your approach to learning was enhanced due to social interaction with others? Or incidences where your approach to learning was negatively impacted due to social interaction with others?’

Another question was to help them be critical about the design of the programme and reflective on their learning through discussing certain suggestions for improving the

programme. Some of the suggestions were informed by the ‘Conversational Framework’ and the checklist by Laurillard (2009). A good example of a suggestion that was informed by the Conversational Framework is about changing the design of the whole group activity such that the main post is to be submitted at the end of the week when the whole group interaction took place. In the suggested design students would submit a post at the beginning of the week including their primary thoughts of the theme of the week, then engage in discussions with their peers and the tutor, and submit the main post at the end of the week. This suggestion was informed by certain items of the checklist, mainly: item 6. “repeat practice, by enabling them to share their trial actions with peers, for comparison and comment”, 7. “reflect on the experience … by offering repeated practice…”, 8. “discuss and debate their ideas with other learners”, and 9. “reflect on their experience, by having to articulate or produce their ideas, reports… to their peers” (Laurillard, 2009, p.19).

Follow up questions were asked to help student participants express their feelings, and to focus on the factors that might enhance their learning. As can be seen, the questions of the interview were indirectly addressing both themes of social presence and metacognition,

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any, and sometimes through addressing the metacognitive skills and the factors that can enhance them.

To focus the attention of participants to the main themes of the research study, and to make sure they had some basic conception of them, a short introduction briefly describing the themes of the thesis was delivered by the interviewer at the beginning of the individual

interviews with participants. For example, metacognition was simply explained as follows: metacognition occurs when the learner becomes aware of how her/his learning or the learning of others occur and controls it.

The questions of the semi-structured interview for the tutor participants discussed mainly the same issues as with student participants, from the tutors’ perspective however. The perspective of tutors was sought in this research study because it is believed that their skills in observing and assessing the learning process, and their holistic view of the interactions among students and the learning outcomes as evident in the written work of students can be a unique approach to describing the educational process.

Each semi-structured interview lasted for about one hour, with some variance that reflected the participants’ openness about their experiences. Due to the flexibility of questions, the variety of perspectives, and the depth of the themes of the research study, the semi-

structured interviews produced a rich body of data that shed the light on various aspects of the online learning experience. All semi structured interviews were conducted within two months; June and July of 2015.

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