Confusing design

[JenniferMcCarth]

1-     The design that I found the most difficult to grasp, and understand is the experimental design. It was stated that initially, the conditions or variables were set, but who is the one that gets to set and determine what qualifies as THE condition or variable? I just find it very time consuming to determine what conditions or variables should be asked. People are constantly changing, so I just have to keep reminding myself of the one variable they all have in common, their age range.

2-     If I were to choose a design method to do research on, I would choose the multi variable correlation design. The participants wouldn’t just be compared or contrasted in two variables(age and sex), but there could be a third variable(education)that may help to further compare or contrast whichever finding the results may lead you, and could decide which way the information may lead you to. I believe I would further use the path analysis to further help to differentiate occurrences participants may have, especially since the latter since researchers test all possible corrections among a single model.

3-     Longitudinal designs are of great value and importance because they follow the same group of participants over the same amount of time, and are often very well planned out before the actual testing even begins! Practical problems that may “hinder these designs” and the “most significant” and perhaps the most obvious is that “it takes years, decades for these studies” to come to actualization, which was discussed when explaining exactly what longitudinal research entails. An example of such a study that was in the documentary was that of the Terman Study on gifted youth, which also studied a group of the same people in intervals of seven years, from the time they were seven years old, up to the age of thirty-five.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello @JenniferMcCarth ...

I'm not sure if you realized this or not, but you have posted your question to the global Canvas Community website where people from all over the world come to ask questions, suggest new Feature Ideas, participate in focus groups, collaborate with others, review written and video tutorials, and a whole lot more...all about Canvas. Your above posting sounds like something you probably meant to post within your course rather than here in the Community website.  I would suggest that you watch this brief video tutorial on how to post replies to topics within your course (if that is what you intended to do):

Discussions Overview (Students)

If you have any other questions about this, I would suggest you reach out to your instructor…as we here in the Community wouldn’t have access to your school’s Canvas environment or your course(s) in question.

How do I get help with Canvas as a student?

I hope this will be of help...good luck to you!

[SusanNiemeyer]

@Chris_Hofer   I wish the Canvas developers would take note that the "Help" feature is confusing to students. We routinely get students asking specific course-related questions on this Forum. The interface needs to be clearer..

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @SusanNiemeyer …

That’s what the Feature Idea area here in the Community is for.  As you probably know, Feature Ideas aren’t the only source of where Instructure gets feedback from us on what we’d like to see implemented in Canvas.  You’re probably familiar with these three Guides which I commonly link to for folks that want to consider creating Feature Ideas:

• How do idea conversations work in the Instructure Community?
• What is the feature development process for Instructure products?
• How do I create a new idea conversation in the Instructure Community?

In the second link, under the heading “Discover”, it details other sources of where Instructure gets feedback and how they use that feedback to prioritize what to work on.  Their roadmap also gives you an idea of what is coming up in the next few months.

A few other thoughts for you…

• If your “Help” menu is not clear for your students, maybe reach out to your school’s local Canvas admin.  They have some control over what links display in the “Help” menu.  And, they can control who can see those links.  For example, we have several links in our “Help” menu (besides the standard ones supplied by Canvas).  Some are only visible to instructors, and some are only visible to students.  But, for me as a Canvas admin, I can see them all…so my “Help” menu is a bit long.
• Have you seen the blog post about the “Help” menu re-design that’s coming to Canvas in the future?  Upcoming Canvas Tier 1 Support Improvements  There are some interesting things in that blog, and maybe those new improvements will be of help to your students.
• I also wonder if sometimes instructors are including a link to the Community in their course discussion topics (maybe as a resource on how to reply to topics), and students think that the Community is where they are supposed to post rather than in their actual course.  This is where having something like the short discussion video tutorial, Discussions Overview (Students), would be very helpful for students beforehand.  Hopefully in this case, the student will see my initial reply and know that the response was meant to be posted in the course rather than here in the Community.

Hope this helps.

[SusanNiemeyer]

@Chris_Hofer  - My students know to send me Inbox messages. But, obviously, many students are confused and they're posting their course-related questions here. It is what it is.