One Size Does Not Fit All - Preliminary Findings

On November 13th, anthro everywhere! blogger Jennifer Long continued her One Size Does Not Fit All series where she provides readers with an overview of her new pedagogical research project in collaboration with Ms. Silvie Tanu Halim at the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice & Technology. This research explores mature and non-traditional students' educational experiences where we seek to understand how these perspectives differ depending on our medium of instruction: online (synchronous, asynchronous), or face-to-face.

We left off on Nov 12th discussing how blogger Jennifer Long invited students to participate in their survey.

Although the survey is still open, the following is a line graph outlining when we received our 86 responses (thus far):

Figure 1. Responses according to date

As mentioned in previous posts, although we did use incentives to encourage participation, it appears that most participants decided to take part soon after the project was introduced by Blogger Jennifer Long.

Dr. Long attended Ms. Tanu Halim's classes on November 07th (online, yes, I made an appearance in the online course) and November 9th (in class). November 7th sees the greatest spike. This spike can perhaps be accounted for, if we consider that students were already in front of their computer when they were invited to participate in an online survey. The second spike appears to be on the Sunday or Monday following my visit to the classroom (after the weekend) on the 10th.

I also thought I'd share some of the aggregated information about those taking part in the survey. When speaking about mature students, it became apparent that the majority of our respondents were between the ages of 21 and 25.

Age Ranges of Participants thus far (Nov 16 2017)

It will be interesting to compare this information with that of other scholars and how individuals 25+ experience education at SEPT when compared to those in the 21-25 category.

What is also informative are their responses to preferences to learning:

Learning Preferences of Mature Students

It will be very interesting to delve into their comments to understand what we see here, that more respondents prefer to learn new course material in-class rather than online.

Check out future posts to learn how the researchers will collect and analyse their data -- or see all posts in the One Size Does Not Fit All research series on our updated page Special Series: Ethnography & ... (formerly "Ethnography & Tourism")

Want to use these findings for your own work? Please cite this source as follows:

• Long, J., & Tanu Halim, S. (2017, November 16). One Size Does Not Fit All - Preliminary Findings [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://anthrolens.blogspot.ca/2017/11/one-size-does-not-fit-all-preliminary.html