NCRM: Delivering a national research methods training programme in a pandemic

You’ll likely be sick of reading it, but this truly is an exceptional period.  Those of us that work or study in universities have been on a rollercoaster as students were sent off-campus and most classroom teaching pivoted rapidly to online delivery, followed by numerous false dawns promising a full return to campus-based learning.  Education is rarely created in the moment: it is a complex product of design, timetabling, content preparation, delivery systems, evaluation and reflection – all of which have been extensively disrupted.  The National Centre for Research Methods commenced a new five-year ESRC funding award in January 2020 with an ambitious programme of face-to-face training events at locations around the UK with speakers, venues and in many cases course delegates, already booked when the first lockdown struck.  Our vision for this phase of the Centre included a steady increase in online training provision, alongside our face-to-face courses, allowing trainers and the NCRM team to take measured steps towards a more blended training offer. 

The reality has turned out to be very different, and NCRM has in many ways been a microcosm of the higher education environment more generally.  The first weeks of lockdown necessitated cancellation and provisional rescheduling of courses, urgent moves to switch planned training online and the first of many discussions about how best to restructure our entire operation.  Would we revert to face-to-face in September 2020? The end of 2020? The end of 2021?  It is clear that we have seen some quite fundamental shifts in both how we deliver research methods training and what that training covers.

Regarding the how, at first glance the shift has been obvious – delivering courses online via platforms such as Zoom and Teams.  However, the implications run far deeper, and have involved almost every aspect of our operation – beginning with some very different dialogues with prospective trainers, seeking in the first instance to establish whether a training course is best suited to the preparation of pre-recorded video and associated learning resources, live video sessions with interaction and supporting materials or a fully-fledged multi-session online training course delivered through a virtual learning environment.  We have had to fast-track our policies on almost every aspect of online learning, establishing the most effective formats, building up the guidance provided to trainers and learners, and reconstructing our evaluation processes.  We have reprioritized our activities, appointed our first learning technologist and are in the process of increasing our IT team.  

You can browse our portfolio of upcoming courses (all currently online) on the Training section of our website and, through the Resources section, our growing collection of always-available online resources. In October, you will be able to participate in our 2021 Research Methods e-Festival, wholly online for the first time. 

While many of us still hanker for the buzz of face-to-face interaction (especially over coffee, in my case) the online formats have undoubtedly led to beneficial changes – allowing delegates to take part in NCRM training from home, with greater control over the pace of learning and timing, alongside reduced costs of participation and improvements in the technical accessibility of course materials.  For short course delegates the equation seems balanced quite differently to undergraduate students – the priority is very often on focused learning rather than the on-campus experience, hence these changes offer much that is good.

Turning to the what aspect, another pandemic consequence has been a differential impact on the research methods for which the community is seeking training.  In general, while researchers have generally been able to continue to use secondary analysis methods, there have been huge obstacles to the conduct of fieldwork involving person-to-person interaction and a corresponding interest in methods suitable for undertaking research in the COVID-19 era, and in best practice for teaching methods – the latter fully reflected in the transformation of the centre itself.

Much of this is captured in a series of projects led by NCRM Co-director Mel Nind (@m_nind on Twitter) entitled Changing Research Practice: Undertaking social science research in the context of Covid-19. The series looks at how Covid-19 is disrupting our research practice by challenging researchers who are conducting social research to re-consider their designs, re-think their ethics, broker different kinds of access, and adapt their research methods. This work has now produced a substantial range of guides and reports covering topics such as adapting interview practices, doing ethical research and adapting participatory methods under Covid-19 conditions.  You can find more about these projects on the team’s webpage.

The big unanswerable question is, of course, how long will we all continue training, learning and researching in this mode?  We are already seeing that universities will be reluctant to open up campus meeting spaces for external training events any time soon, just as delegates may be understandably reluctant to travel to undertake training that has worked remarkably well online.  As it seems inevitable that there will never be a full return to the pre-pandemic norms, we are now planning an NCRM with a much greater online emphasis for the long term – although we’re also very much looking forward to getting out and meeting some of our community (and one another) as it becomes safe and acceptable to do so!


David Martin, University of Southampton @GeogDave

Co-director, ESRC National Centre for Research Methods

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