Context: Honours level research project course. The professional body accreditation requirement is experimental research (rather than a literature review). The course carries 36 credits requiring 360 notional hours and is spread over a year, let's say over 36 weeks. Obviously the students need to plan their work and then do 10 hours of work per week - if they leave it to the last minute they will not be able to finish. This requires motivation and realizing early on what is required. The students may choose to do a MOOC on academic integrity during the course. The MOOC is set up for the research class cohort, in a separate online classroom, so that the classmates in the research project course can all participate in the MOOC together. 

Research questions:

Can building a community of inquiry (CoI) in the cohort contribute to student motivation and in turn completion rates?

Does the community of inquiry equip learners to become researchers more quickly, so enhancing the quality of the research reports?

Does participation in the academic integrity MOOC (an aspect of the CoI) result in lower Turnitin scores on submitted work and better quality academic writing?

Approach:

Evaluation research

Measurement:

Use various activities throughout the year to build a Community of Inquiry. Use an instrument (survey) from the published literature to determine whether the CoI has effectively been established at the beginning and the end of the course. Look for correlations between student success rates and CoI establishment. 

Look for correlations between number of research projects published as peer-reviewed articles and CoI establishment.

Look for inverse correlations between Academic Integrity MOOC and Turnitin scores. (Whilst also checking that there is no masking in terms of Turnitin detection.)