Curious how my colleague Alexandre Afonso and I have revamped our Research Methods course from a traditional seminar format into a flipped classroom, using blended learning? The first instalment in a new blog series on our course has appeared on the Active Learning in Political Science blog!
Here’s a sneak peak:
The idea behind our Research Methods 3.0 course was simple: in order to be able to spend more class time on practicing hands-on research skills, we needed to move some of our teaching online. In our department, graduate courses often only meet once a week and the duration of a typical course is seven weeks, too short a time to cover the full range of social science methodologies. We quickly learned that our students did not need such a broad survey to carry out their own thesis projects. This led to our second decision: not only would part of the course be moved online, but it would also be modular, allowing students to pick and choose which research methods they wanted to specialize in.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing how we built the online environment for our flipped classroom, the set-up of our offline workshops, using the flipped classroom for collaborative teaching and what our students thought of our flip.
Read along!
Natascha van der Zwan 