Research projects in teaching: how do IB Hochschule students experience their role as students during the corona crisis?

The presidium's weekly review documents the challenges in everyday university life caused by Covid-19.

In the module "Qualitative research methods in health sciences", the goal is for students to recognise therapeutic and societal research needs, communicate these and, based on acquired knowledge of qualitative research approaches, also work on them. To do this, research projects are carried out within the teaching.

From among the students, various feedback was received about their experience of the contact restrictions due to Covid-19 and the associated online teaching.

Thus the idea arose to research exactly these effects. On the one hand, this was seen as an opportunity to address a current topic in the research projects; on the other, it allows students to look more closely at their personal experience of the corona crisis.

After research groups had been formed, the overarching topic was further refined for the continued work. Initial research on the subject, narrowing the topic and developing a first question yielded various perspectives for the research work.

In parallel to acquiring the theoretical knowledge (basic terms of research logic, characteristics of qualitative research, research designs, methods of data collection and analysis in qualitative research methodology, research ethics and quality criteria of qualitative research), the students work on their research topics. In online teaching this takes place in digital rooms in MS Teams.

Goals of the module are the implementation of the developed research design in the research field as well as the analysis of the collected data in the form of a written paper. We can be very excited about the results.

Prof. Dr. Antje Schubert