Syllabus

Course Description

Research, Assessment, & Design is a core curriculum course in the Masters of Library and Information Science at the University of Washington’s Information School. This course is meant to help you recognize research opportunities, translate those opportunities into answerable research questions, and successfully carry out research projects in libraries and other information-rich settings.

Class Structure

LIS 570 is run as an asynchronous course. You are not required to attend any class sessions or in-person meetings. However, you will need to actively and regularly engage with the following course content in order to succeed in LIS 570:

Each week of the course will be organized around a topic, or set of topics. You will be responsible for watching the lecture, reading assigned material, and completing weekly exercises or activities. You do not have to turn in the completed exercises or activities. These will not be a part of your grade.

Class Discussions

Each week your TA’s and I will host a 1 hour course discussion. The discussion will be an opportunity for you to offer thoughts, pose questions, or debate with us about that week’s topic.

Discussion times (Pacific Standard Time):

All calls will be hosted in a private Zoom channel, and will be recorded in case you are not able to attend but would like to catch up.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successfully completing this course you will be able to:

  1. Find and critically engage with research literature; with specific attention to evaluating how research is produced by people in diverse social, economic, and political contexts.
  2. Recognize research needs and opportunities, translate these into actionable research designs, collect and analyze resulting data, and present findings and insights from research in creative and persuasive ways.
  3. Identify the appropriate research method to conduct assessment, evaluation, design and management of library and information services;
  4. Articulate basic principles of research and design methods and apply them to solve real-life problems that improve information systems and contribute to social justice, equity and inclusion.

Assignments + Grading

There is a separate page of the course site that explains the three assignments that will make up your grades. Please review this page carefully. Each of the assignments has a draft and a final deliverable due date.

Note: There are no participation grades in this class.

This course uses the iSchool Standard Grading Scheme, which converts percentage grades into 4.0 grades.

Final grades will be on a 4.0 scale in which a minimum of 2.7 (about 70%) is required to pass (per iSchool grading criteria). The conversion scale is the standard conversion scale for iSchool graduate courses.

Late Work

I have a no questions asked policy for assignment extensions. I do not need to know why you require an extension, I only require that you communicate with me 48 hours in advance to request an extension. If you do not contact me in advance there will be 15% points taken off for each day that an assignment is late.

Academic Conduct

Please review the iSchool Academic Policies which cover:

Student Resources

A number of challenges from a variety of directions can affect your ability to bring your optimal attention and energy to a course. Student Resources is a set of links to campus resources that UW makes available to students in trying to mitigate and cope with some of these challenges.

iSchool Technology Requirements

The iSchool has a set of technology requirements for both online and residential students. We highly recommend that students adhere to these standards which are updated annually. Students who do not meet these standards may experience technology problems throughout the course.

iSchool Learning Technologies Support Site

Knowledge base for Canvas, VoiceThread, web conferencing systems, and other learning technologies tools.

UW Libraries

In this course you may be required to access a large number of databases through the Internet. Several of these databases are publicly available, but some are proprietary and access requires authentication through the UW Libraries (Links to an external site.). Information about logging in to use these databases is available on the Connecting to the Libraries (Links to an external site.) page.

Religious Accommodations Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy (https://registrar.washington.edu/staffandfaculty/religious-accommodations-policy/). Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form (https://registrar.washington.edu/students/religious-accommodations-request/).

For a complementary, quantitative emphasis, see iSchool faculty Jacob Wobbrock’s Coursera course Designing, Running and Analyzing Experiments.

You can also take more advanced courses in research methods at the iSchool: