Teaching Qualitative Methods Online to Doctoral Students

With the increasing numbers of students enrolling in online degree programs, it has become necessary to offer online course options in educational research methods as well. As many students struggle with the complexity of a research methods course, online instructors have to take particular care when they design courses for students with whom they may never have any face-to-face contact. The proposed presentation wants to discuss the experiences of one instructor who developed and taught a successful qualitative methods course using an online platform and provide some nuts-and-bolts advice on how to make a course successful and how to overwhelm ourselves and our students. Presentation topics will center on course layout, structure, and design; content quality vs. quantity; assignment development and management; feedback quality and quantity; communication with students; handling the challenges that students experience in all qualitative methods courses (e.g., inconsistent terminology, no-show participants, etc.); and unexpected troubles and misunderstandings that occurred