Text and speech

First notes- interviews with graduates from a fully online work-focused BA

Personalisation - All modules are designed to enable students in a wide range of employment contexts to personalise their study focus in order to identify and achieve professional development targets and demonstrate progression of academic skills.

Research - each module involves the application of research strategies in small scale projects to enhance individual professional practice and contribute to organisational learning.

Digital competence - students explore communications technologies and the effective use of technologies relevant to their current work role and to their career aspirations.

Interviews were conducted using Schutze's narrative interview method. Audio recordings were listened to then transcribed by reducing the speed by 30% to match my typing speed. Audio recordings of Skype or Phone interviews were captured using Audacity, these were saved using a participant code; P1, P2, etc. Each was listened to at normal speed then transcribed by slowing the playback to match my typing speed. Immersion in data has proved valuable in my past research, at this point I had immersed myself in the interview three times. The transcript was typed on a plain text page, in order to analyse it i reduced it to smaller chunks and pasted each into subsequent cells in the first column of a spreadsheet. This was the first stage deconstruction, the breaking down of the narrative into meaningful discrete units in oder to manage the analysis.

The next step on my spreadsheet was to add emphasis markers. Additions such as [conviction], [questioning self] or [tentative] indicate the nature of the words as indicated by tone of voice. Adding this layer involved a detailed listen to the recording, this time with lots of pausing and rewinding to check emphasis or meaning. My perception of each narrative became increasingly detailed as it was broken down into to little chunks of a few sentences.

Using a spreadsheet is a logical way of dealing with a complex narrative. Having examined the transcripts in this way I felt I had become over occupied with detail and needed to view the data in a different way.  I now wanted to be a removed and immersed listener to the whole story of the narrative. To listen to it in the same way I would a radio play. Sea kayaking from point to point on open sea can involve hours of rhythmic repetitive movement with very little distraction, in gentle sea conditions it is immensely calming and meditative and promotes a great state of mind for reflection. I transferred two interview recordings to my phone, put it in a waterproof phone case put my headphones on and set off for a gentle sea kayak trip with a GoPro mounted on deck so I could shout out any notes I wanted to make. 

Listening to students talking in this way did help me at least feel like I was more able to mentally step inside their skin and walk around in their existence as promoted by Harper Lee via Atticus. P4 opens by discussing why she chose the course, it is immediately apparent that the phrase: 'family comes first' was a high level governing factor and that when this participant was looking for a course she was looking for a 'manageable course’ in order to achieve hear family first ideal. Analysis of the whole transcript via spreadsheet shows that for this participant the underlying affective driver remained 'family first'. Listening to the whole of the narrative while kayaking it clear that in every instance P4 considers the manageability of the experience. Literature based research and use of technologies is not perceived as relavant to career needs so there was no attempt to excel in these areas but there was care to ensure an adequate pass. The participant had set clear parameters in order to fit study to life without significantly compromising the life experience for those around her. Her strategy for achieving this was to create a detailed individual learning plan and to modify it regularly to track progression. The more detail she put into the ILP the more useful it became and the more confident she felt in respect of her ability to be flexible.