Friday, May 8, 2009

Questionnaires and interviews

The learners have now completed the online questionnaire and I now need to save the results electronically. I have begun to interview key staff who are working on the Diploma and my attempts at interviewing are highlighting some issues.

I am using a a very funky orange Flip camera to record my interviews. In the first interview, conducted with a member of the Entitlement and Support team, I held the camera and frankly it looks like we did the interview sitting on a bus. Second time around, I used the tripod that comes with the Flip. Although the film does not look as jerky, the angle of the tripod meant that the subject was looking down and in her own words it made her look miserable! Third time lucky then...I have just conducted my third interview, this time with a professional tripod and this enabled me to sit behind the camera and the interviewee was able to look at me as she answered the questions. An altogether better result and I will use this tripod in the future.

My questions have been OK and I have managed to stick closely to the questions as written and this has been fairly successful. I intended to interview a number of other staff from the school of Computing, but I am going to ask them to submit their answers on paper now as we are close to going live with the Diploma course on Moodle and I want their feedback before this date (12th May).