Help with using this course
Activities and tools
This free course, Becoming an ethical researcher, uses a variety of interactive tools to help you develop your ideas. The following pages of this guidance section should provide you with all the information you need to use these tools and approaches effectively. You may prefer not to read through all at once, but to refer back to it as necessary while you work through the course.
The main ways you will participate in this course are:
- ‘Think about’ points, in which you are asked questions designed to help you reflect on the ideas discussed in the course. You may find it useful to take notes about these reflections, as the ideas you have at these points will feed into later activities. It is up to you whether you take these notes on paper or as a digital file. You will not need to share these notes but they will help you when drafting your course forum posts. They will also be useful to refer to when you answer the quiz questions.
- A course forum [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] in which you will respond to set tasks and be able to read the responses of other learners on the course. Reading others’ contributions will help you think further about the ideas raised in this course, especially when the responses are from people of different backgrounds and nationalities to you. Documents, such as mind maps and photos, can be uploaded as part of your responses. For the forum activities you will sometimes be asked to post a response and also to refer to other participants’ responses. This may require coming back to the discussion forum on more than one occasion, as posts will appear over time. You can find more information on how to use the course forum on the next page, Using the forum.
You will also be invited to engage in the following activities to help you develop your ideas and articulate your thinking:
- Interactive activities in which you will be asked to choose between optional statements and drag and drop your selections into tables, in order to try out your thinking about ethical principles and practices. You can press ‘Reveal answer’ after having a go to review your selections.
- Mind mapping to help you brainstorm ideas and connect them with one another. Again this can be on paper or digitally – such as using the online tool Mindmup.com. These mind maps will be for personal reference but you will sometimes be encouraged to upload and share these to the course forum via screenshot or an image/photograph/scan. Further guidance on Taking Screenshots is available in this help document.
- Polls are included in Activity 4 of Session 3. You are asked to vote in response to questions by selecting possible scenarios. You can vote for more than one scenario. Anonymous results will be published after you answer.
The course is open for 11 months of the year but is designed to take about six weeks of study. You may experience that some peer learners will join or leave the interactive and collaborative areas while you are studying. However, you will therefore have others to interact with.