Designing and managing an online, personalised research writing course for postgraduates

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 personalised, self-regulated and peer learning, and the optimal use of class time. 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 liked 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.