Note to Ethics Committee
Below is the provisional Information sheet, to be emailed to all Social Media Toolkit Participants,
along with the consent form.
It will be possible to post or the consent form and information sheet, and they will also be provided
online, on the toolkit website (www.moocie.org), and on a form completion website ( e.g.
Surveymonkey.com)
Aspects of the sheet are necessarily provisional – for example, the final decision on the platform to
be used for the MOOC has not been reached, final dates have not yet been formalised, etics
approval has not yet been attained, and the curriculum may be subject to slight change. But the
substantial issues – the media to be used, information to be collected, the research focus – will
remain unchanged.
Participation Information sheet for the moocie Social Media Toolkit
The Social Media toolkit is part of my MSc Research Project, for Dublin Institute of Technologies’
MSc in Applied ELearning.
Research Project Aims
The Social Media Toolkit aims to give users a basic grounding in the use of, and theory behind, using
Twitter and blogging in education, both for professional development, and as classroom tools for use
with students. The Research aspect of the project involves gauging what effect, if any, providing a
training resource – the toolkit – will have on people’s interest in, and participation in the short
MOOC that follows.
What participation involves
We hope participants will use the toolkit, and the tools and techniques it covers. Participants will
need to register a twitter account, and a Wordpress account to use the toolkit. Both of these
platforms are public platforms – anything you publish on them, and any profile information you add
to them, will be completely public. Mad, as you use the toolkit, and experiment with blogging and
tweeting, we’ll be collecting information about your social media usage – the number of tweets you
make during the course, the number of blog posts, and we’ll be analysing the tweets and blogs you
make to try to gain an understanding of how you are using Social Media, and what that might mean
to you.
We’ll also be asking participants to voluntarily fill in two questionnaires – one before the toolkit
course, and one after. And we’ll be interviewing, again, on a voluntary basis, participants who did
both the toolkit, and the mooc that followed, to try to gauge what effect the toolkit had.
Questionnaire and interview responses will be used in the research paper, and may be published. All
such data will be anonymised, and any identifying information removed, and any direct quotation of
individuals will be with permission.
We will also be collecting participation information from the main course, that follow on from the
toolkit. This will log who attends seminars, which seminars they attend, and for how long. This
information may be included in the published research, but will be strictly and carefully anonymised.
All information and data collected is directly related to the aims of the research project –
determining what effect providing social media tutorials in advance of a course using social media
will have on participation – and the data will be strictly anonymised before publication. The only
person who will have access to the unanonymised data is myself. The exception here are tweets and
blog posts which, when published, are publically available.
Access to the course, and toolkit is free and open. It is not dependent on agreeing to fill in
questionnaires or interviews, and participants are free to withdraw permission, at any stage, for
their responses to be used in the research project. Access to the toolkit, instructors, seminars and
materials is in no way dependent on completing questionnaires and interviews.
What will happen to the data and information?
The research is intended for publication, so any information or data included in the written research
will be publically available.
In practice, that means that the number of tweets and blog posts made by the course participants as
a whole will be published. Where it’s necessary to talk about individual tweet and blog post usage,
no identifying characteristics will be included. This will be completely anonymous. Interview and
questionnaire responses will also be anonymised, so as to be untraceable to individuals. The number
of participants will be disclosed, and usage statistics, where available, will be disclosed, but, again,
anonymised.
Individual tweets and blog posts may be quoted. Participants should be aware of the public and
published nature of twitter and blog posts. They are published, public, and available for anyone to
see, read, copy, republish (with attribution) and archive. During the course of the research we will,
possibly, be quoting published tweets and blog posts where they help understanding of the effects
and experiences people had. As tweets and blog posts are considered public domain, and already in
the public arena, permission will not be sought for quoting, but an individuals social media usage
patterns will not be disclosed.
Participants will be identified for the purposes of the study by their twitter and blog user names.
The list of participants will not be made available to anyone else, and is solely to enable analysis of
individual patterns of social media use. We need to know who tweeted what, and what blog posts
they made, for our analysis, but this information will be anonymised before publication.
With the exception of tweets and blog posts, no information that identifies individuals will be
shared, quoted, or publicised, and individual confidentiality with regard to questionnaires or
interviews, coursework, seminar attendance, participation within seminars, usage statistics,
correspondence, questionnaires, interviews and conversations is guaranteed. Where we would like
to quote directly from an individual in a way that might identify them here, we will seek permission
in advance, and individuals are free to give or deny that permission as they see fit, with no loss of
access to instruction or coursework.
Where participants are interviewed for the research project, they will have the opportunity to
review transcripts of the interview to review before publication, and to withdraw permission for
publication. Permission will be sought for quoting interview transcripts, and all identifying material
will be removed before publication.
Ethics approval
This Research Project, and all the data collection, analysis, and research practices have been passed
by DIT’s Ethics Committee.
Contact details and clarification
I’m available at the main moocie email, keith@moocie.org, and via twitter, @wiltwhatman, or by
phone at 0860507798 (+353860507798 for participants outside of the Republic of Ireland) should
any clarification of further assistance be desired. If you have any questions about the project, or
require further information, please feel free to contact me.
DIT ethics committee can be contacted at raffaella.salvante@dit.ie if there are any complaints about
the ethical procedures involved in the course.