Co-creating the Research League: Into the Multiverse of REx Workshops

Losheini RAVINDRAN* and John Leo CAINES
Undergraduate Research Coordinating Team, Office of the Provost (PVO) 

*loshr1@nus.edu.sg

 

Ravindran, L., & Caines, J. L. (2023). Co-creating the research league: Into the multiverse of REx workshops [Paper presentation]. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2023, 7 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecc2023proceedings/co-creating-the-research-league-into-the-multiverse-of-rex-workshops/  

SUB-THEME

Interdisciplinarity and Education

 

KEYWORDS

Undergraduate research, collaborative learning, Undergraduates Research Opportunity Programme, UROP, REx, course upgrade

 

CATEGORY

Paper Presentations 

 

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on interdisciplinarity and education, and the role of the REx programme in building partnerships with the various departments and disciplines across the campus. Research Experience, known as REx is a course upgrade to the UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme) course. The pertinence of research in undergraduate education has been underscored in the recent innovation and development efforts of today. Given the rising importance of the research and innovation sector, it is important for the institution to work towards providing quality research education for students in the very early stages of their undergraduate education. In pursuit of contributing to increase the number of undergraduate students engaged in research, the REx course upgrade programme was conceptualised to provide students with a strong foundation in research by introducing them to topics which include formulating good research questions, constructing good hypotheses, choosing optimal research methods, writing a research paper, and communicating research professionally.

 

The course upgrade design of the programme has been structured in a way that the running of each workshop provides an introductory interaction with the topics and caters to the general research foundational needs of students across the various disciplines. This ensures that there is sustainability and consistency associated with the learning of the REx workshops and programme at large (Hansen, 2000).

 

Workshops such as “Ethics in Research” focused on that idea that educational experience is interaction, particularly in the form of “free communication” (Garrison, 2015, p. 14), where students were given the task of analysing various case studies that posed an ethical dilemma in research. This enabled students to have more space in brainstorming the thought processing of ethical factors without any inhibitions. This interaction facilitated greater critical thinking in developing greater awareness about what were the considerations to be made when dealing with human participants, for instance.

 

It is pertinent to note that these workshops were collaborations with the various units in NUS. The workshop “Research Methodologies” was conceptualised with regular discussions with NUS Libraries, and the expertise of colleagues from the NUS Centre for Future-ready Graduates (CFG) was sought for the workshop “Career in Research”. We have also opened our discussion and collaborative efforts with external vendors that aim to explore effective ways in communicating data and also reached out to Kontinentalist to conduct the “Data Storytelling” workshop. This REx-branded workshop received much support from our faculty colleagues and students. The reason for our consistent pursuit in seeking partnering opportunities with the various units (and relevant research organisation/industries moving forward) stems from the sense of shared purpose and mutual interdependence in achieving intended learning outcomes in promoting research to undergraduates, given the benefits of collaborative approaches to higher-order learning (Garrison, 2015). We are focusing in moving towards a collaboration in forming a cohesive research ecosystem than a cooperative one, given that cooperation deals more with a common task than a common goal.

 

We have been cognisant of the importance in measuring the effectiveness of this collaborative pursuit in making research an enriching experience for students enrolled in the UROP+REx programme and collated students’ feedback. For example, in the feedback data for the seminar “Research with Visual Narratives”¹, 61% of REx attendees liked the hands-on segment of learning how to design a comic. Most of the REx fellows shared that the seminar was well-facilitated and encouraged them to brainstorm the various illustrative dimensions to any research undertaking.

 

Although all the REx attendees found the seminar to very useful in communicating research to the general public, the REx attendees from the Faculty of Science felt that most of the time, unless their research is some large scaled scientific discovery, they will be communicating and presenting their work to other fellow peers in the same field as them. Hence, they felt that a formal presentation or something like a scientific poster would be expected in such cases rather than an informal presentation. While these considerations pose the question of the level of relevance of this approach across the disciplines, it is significant to note that more than half the number of attendees saw a visual narrative approach in presenting research as a tool of communication that connects audiences across various disciplines.

 

Hence, REx’s pilot efforts reinstate the possibility of venturing into a “multiverse” of research learning possibilities across various disciplines, with the common shared purpose in making research an insightful experience that propels undergraduate education towards a collaborative learning ecosystem.

 

ENDNOTE

1. This seminar teaches students how to look closely at visual narratives. The main examples are comics/graphic novels, but including brief discussion of other types of narrative visual media, such as film, animation, and even memes. Looking at some recent publications that present complex theoretical concepts in comics format, students will learn how visual narratives direct our attention and create meaning.

 

REFERENCES

Garrison, D. R. (2015). Thinking collaboratively: Learning in a community of inquiry. Taylor and Francis.

Hansen, R. E. (2000). The role and experience in learning: Giving meaning and authenticity to the learning process in schools. Journal of Technology Education, 11(2), 23-33. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/8234

Kortz, K. M., & van der Hoeven Kraft, K. J. (2016). Geoscience education research project: Student benefits and effective design of a course-based undergraduate research experience. Journal of Geoscience Education, 64(1), 24-36. https://doi.org/10.5408/15-11.1

Semingson, P., Smith, P., & Anderson, H. I. (2018). The Community of Inquiry framework in contemporary education: Emerging research and opportunities. IGI Global

Undergraduate Research Coordinating Team, PVO. (2023). REx Programme Pilot Report.