Jennifer Skipp and Katrien L. B. Deroey
This paper describes and evaluates a multidisciplinary, online research writing course for PhD students. First, we explain our course rationale and set-up. The core principles are independent work, optimal use of class time, mixed methods of student learning and personalisation. This is achieved through the following components: an e-coursebook developed in-house, tasks preparing students for the workshops, workshops, writing and reflection, peer review and individual consultations. Next, we review participants’ feedback from course evaluation surveys. Many students were satisfied with the online format although most would prefer the peer review and discussion of theory to happen offline. A key finding for course efficacy is that students greatly valued working with their own examples in the workshops. They saw this and independent learning tasks as the greatest drivers of their writing development. They also benefited from multidisciplinary peer review. As regards the writing and reflection, all students chose to write on their own, and the writing reflection tool was deemed ineffective. We furthermore discuss our (teachers’) perceptions of the affordances and challenges of this course format. On the one hand, it allows workshops to be devoted to collaborative tasks, reflection and data-driven learning. On the other hand, preparing such workshops is very time-consuming, while the multiple components and regular task submissions carry a heavy administrative burden. The paper concludes with how lessons learnt have been implemented into the current course configuration.
