JISC innovation in elearning case studies: Sheffield Hallam University, Use of video case studies to highlight issues in Qualitative Research Methods

In this instance the innovation was the use of video to illustrate examples of qualitative research.

It gives students deeper insights into the research and develops their critical visual literacy skills.

I think it's interesting. We are looking at a research paper at the moment in H809 where part of the methodology was to video children to assess their group reasoning skills. I was thinking that the inclusion of video along with the analysis would allow for a much deeper level of understanding of the research.Although I guess there are privacy issues there. I would love to see this more in online journal papers though, where appropriate/possible - multimedia papers!

I read last week (and I can't remember where, was it on H807 forums or on RSS feeds?) that there is a growing call for researchers to release data along with research papers for public scrutiny (and presumably collaboration on the analysis and interpretation). I'm, all for that (again, where appropriate).

Back to the case study... it is noted that the interaction of the resource with the teaching is important.

If I was to relate this to any of the other case studies, I would say that it highlights that integrating online technologies can help bring the theory closer to the practice and allow for situated learning in authentic contexts (Brown 1989). I'm not sure I would class this as elearning in a very progressive sense though - it seems that the ‘e’ part is just that the videos are placed online. However, other institutions have used the resources and perhaps this could lead to a pooling of resources which could lead to more and diverse examples in future (that’s just speculation though…).

I did follow the link to the resources site to have a look, but I got ODBC errors when trying to view the videos and there were quite a lot of dead links...