RES701- Blog 12 “Reviewing RES701 course”

Hello everyone. This RES701 blog is going to be the last blog for the semester. I have decided to summaries what I learned from this course and review it. I will also be include few things I learned from my previous RES701 blogs.

I will start by saying that I really loved studying this paper and Lars, our tutor is a really amazing person. He is a very knowledgeable person and the way he explained things, the activities/ tasks he arranged for us, the presentation, etc., were very useful and helpful in a lot of ways. It was a great opportunity for me to learn things about research that I have never known before. The main reason why I decide to do this course was to get prepared and learn new skills to guide me to perform well in my final year’s project which is going to be a primary research project.

We started this course by looking into what research is, learned about plagiarism, and started writing blogs as our personal journal. Then we learned about ontology, epistemology and how they are related to each other. At first, I had no clue what this is all about but then as Lars introduced different types of research paradigms, how each paradigm is suitable for a particular scenario, etc., I started to see things differently. Comparing my idea of what research was and what I learned from the classes made me realize a whole new side of it. We also discussed about the difference between truth and facts which improve my understanding of it. Then we had some activities where we search for materials that were related to our assessments and learned about credibility and validity. We also looked into finding academic articles for the literature review and learned about ethics, copyright, copyleft, intellectual properties, and creative commons.

Things I like about this course are as follow:

• The course is structured well.
• There was a good transition from one topic to another.
• Blogs were useful because it allowed to revise the topics I learned in the class.
• The difficulty level of the assignments were good
• Lots of activities in class that allows communication between group members.
• Most of the things were new, so I learned many things from this course, etc.

Things I disliked about this course are as follow:

• There was just 1 group presentation. I wanted more group presentations.
• Including blogs as part of assessment.

Recommendation

I would recommend that if the RES701 class was scheduled to morning time, it would make alot of difference because everyone will be active , energetic, focused and engaged in the topic and conversation. It would then become an interesting class to attend and study.

That’s all for the blog, and I hope you enjoyed reading the blog. Thank you.