**6. Methodology**

216 International Perspectives of Distance Learning in Higher Education

with the opportunity to articulate and engage in acts deemed appropriate when the focus is on the process of the learning activity, rather than exclusively on its task-specific outcome. This study was developed to assess the extent to which prospective students of the UWI Open Campus' online graduate programmes were engaging in the learning process in a manner that would facilitate their attainment of the stated outcome of producing annotated bibliographies. To this end, content analysis methods were used to analyze the annotations produced by teams of students as part of their participation in the orientation course that was developed to assist them in strengthening their competency to engage in online

In light of the foregoing, a research study was conducted, based on the following research

1. How competent are incoming online graduate students of the UWI Open Campus in sourcing material related to an essay topic and developing annotated bibliographies on

2. What preliminary instructional strategies can be gleaned from the analysis of these

1. How capable are these prospective graduate students at identifying and interpreting

3. How capable are the students at selecting appropriate segments of material sourced

There are two limitations that should be noted about this study. The researcher did not read any of the source materials. Thus the annotations were examined without direct reference to the documents on which they were based. While this may be regarded as a disadvantage in one sense, it was felt that annotations can stand on their own, capable of communicating the information required by those accessing them. This researcher did not consider it necessary

In the instructions provided in the study guide, students' attention was drawn to the three broad tasks that the Purdue OWL website highlighted for developing the annotation, namely summarize, evaluate and reflect. The analysis done for this study focused on the summarizing aspect only for two reasons. First, in most annotations, there was no evidence of the other two dimensions. In the few instances where there was an attempt at the evaluative, these were largely not in keeping with the core requirements of such a task. This will be explored in more detail later. Given this situation, the researcher decided to concentrate on the summarizing aspect of the annotation. While this may be regarded as a

5. What are the areas of weaknesses that need to be addressed through instruction?

Based on these questions, the following sub-questions were generated:

2. How capable are the students at analyzing a complex essay topic?

to refer to the sources in order to assess the annotations themselves.

relative to the requirements of an essay topic? 4. What summary-writing skills do these students display?

learning at the graduate level.

the materials sourced?

**5. Limitations of the study** 

annotations?

key terms?

**4. Research questions** 

questions:

Content analysis methods were employed for both data collection and data analysis. In describing the research method of the study therefore, no distinction is made between procedures used for data collection and those used for data analysis since one set flowed seamlessly into the other.

### **6.1 Overview of research method**

A mixed-methods approach was employed in the design of this study; thus methodology combined quantitative and qualitative as well as inductive and deductive approaches.
