Unfortunately, student participation in the final workshop was zero due to the following reasons:
• Stress and tiredness, as the workshop was scheduled at the end of the term, close to submission and presentation deadlines.
• Optional status: Because I had to find an extra slot in the schedule, my course leader explicitly stated that the workshop needed to be optional, which jeopardized attendance.
• Greater interest in hard skills development to meet deadlines.
• Timing conflict, as the workshop was scheduled immediately before another mandatory class. the workshop was scheduled immediately before another mandatory class.
This affected my data gathering, as I had intended to collect more qualitative data from students through an extensive questionnaire and by using observation and field notes to capture their behaviour and thought processes during activities.
Therefore, I decided to analyse students’ blogs, all Padlet documentation, PDF/PPT presentations, and observations from class interactions to gather more information and check progress against my goals. I consider this as “last-minute holistic approach” to use Observation as the only research methods used for this ARP.
Please refer to the following link to see how I ended up collecting my data: