This research project provided my first opportunity, within the course of the MALAT program, to collect and analyze primary data. Since the course blanket ethics for the DLRCP allowed for up to 10 interviews, I knew early on in my planning process that I wanted to seize this exciting opportunity to talk to teachers first-hand and hear about their experiences with Free Learning. This meant that including interviews as part of my research methods was one of my first design decisions. However, how those interviews would work and what questions I would ask were areas that required further investigation.
Through research into qualitative methods and interview design, I decided that semi-structured interviews would be a good fit for this project. “The semi-structured interview is a popular data collection method” which is “both versatile and flexible” (Kallio, Pietiläm, Johnson, & Kangasniemi, 2016, p. 2955). It would enable my interview conversations to flow organically (Carruthers, 1990), and opened opportunities to ask for clarification or further information during the interview (Rubin & Rubin, 2005). Initially, through a conversation with my academic supervisor, I discovered that my challenge would be to narrow my questions down. I had created over twenty five questions during the draft of my interview questions, and I learned that to keep my interview flexible, I would need to narrow these down to about five questions. Do do this, I used sticky notes and wrote my questions down, then moved them around until I created groups of questions. I kept several of my original questions as prompts, but narrowed the final questions down to the following list:
- Tell me about how you first heard about Free Learning and became involved with it. What attracted you to use it?
- Walk me through your experience getting up and running with Free Learning.
- Can you describe any challenges you faced, or continue to face, using Free Learning.
- Tell me about the types of resources you used to create your Free Learning map.
- Based on your experiences, what do you envision would help other teachers to get started using Free Learning?
- Considering the topics we’ve discussed, are there any other thoughts you would like to share?
The last question, although not initially part of my five, was recommended by my academic supervisor and helped to broaden the interviews to include any additional thoughts or experiences from the participants. Before my interviews I worried that these questions would be too broad, and didn’t intersect with OER enough. However, these questions ended up being highly effective in revealing themes and ideas that I had not initially considered, and I truly enjoyed the experience of listening to the personal stories that interviewees shared during our conversations.
References
Carruthers, J. (1990). A Rationale for the Use of Semi‐structured Interviews. Journal of Educational Administration, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239010006046
Kallio, H., Pietilä, A. M., Johnson, M., & Kangasniemi, M. (2016). Systematic methodological review: developing a framework for a qualitative semi-structured interview guide. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 72(12), 2954–2965. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13031
Rubin H. J. & Rubin I. S. (2005). Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing the Data, 2nd edn. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA.