Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research

That is the name of my text book for my next course, Advanced Study in Research Methods. Overwhelming, no?

The course starts on Monday but being the uber-good learner that I am, I'm starting it today. In the first unit/week, I have to read ten chapters, two websites, install software, view a video, and post three discussion questions and responses. This course is not for the faint at heart. Ideally, courses should require approximately 10 hours of work on the part of the learner per week. Seeing as how each of those chapters and discussion questions would be estimated at 2 hours, well, it's a tad over the baseline. But that's okay. I mean, with a course that gives an relatively complete overview of both major types of research, you can expect to have a lot of work to do. Most courses have 2-4 assignments over the course of a 10 week quarter. This course has nine. Nine assignments - most involving statistical analysis. For those of you who don't know, I (quite literally) cried my way through my undergraduate statistics course. It has now become a thing of legend how I went into the final exam with a 46% and somehow got a C in the course. Clearly, I got 150% on the final exam. :p

I'm going to spend my day doing the following:

1. State the research topic or problem and write a brief summary of the topic and why I am interested in the topic.
2. Write two purpose statements for the research topic - quantitative and qualitative.
3. Write two research questions that address the research purposes - quantitative and qualitative.
4. Write a hypothesis for the quantitative research question.
5. Identify the variables for both research questions. For the quantitative research question, identify the independent and dependent variables
6. Identify the population to be researched for the quantitative approach and identify the purposeful sample to be researched in the qualitative approach.

Ideally, I should be able to tailor the assignments of the course to the topic and research question I want to answer in my dissertation. So while this course, in and of itself, is difficult, I am essentially beginning my dissertation now too. Should be an interesting quarter to say the least.