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The course syllabus presents all the important elements of a course before it begins. It is a fundamental document to know what’s expected from you, and what you can expect from us. Read it carefully and use it as a guide for this course.

 

1. Introduction

MRE1x In a Nutshell

1.1. Course Overview

Welcome to Multidisciplinary Research Methods for Engineers!

The increasing use of data to understand phenomena and evaluate designs and interventions in different disciplines becomes more and more evident. As a result, engineers and other applied scientists find themselves increasingly collaborating in multidisciplinary fields when carrying out research to remain innovative. These research methods tend to differ greatly from those used in engineering.

The interuniversity, interdisciplinary Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Education and Learning is a leader in multidisciplinary technological research and innovation projects. Together with leading experts in the field, you will learn to apply the best practices in the field.

This course will help you to become a successful multidisciplinary researcher in industry, non-profit, or academia, and be more efficient and successful as you will know where the pitfalls are! This course offers the fundamentals on how to plan and carry out state-of-the-art qualitative and quantitative research in different phases of an innovation or research project.

The course has been designed by a team of experienced, multi-disciplinary researchers in education, engineering, and research methodologies and will also feature experts in the field of research methodologies as guest lecturers. In the course, you will be working towards creating a project plan for your research; giving you a head-start in your research project.

The course is aimed at engineers working, or going to work in multidisciplinary environments who want to learn more about this type of research. You do not have to be an engineer to take part though, there are no prerequisites, although having some knowledge of basic statistics can be useful.

The course consists of 6 modules, each scheduled to last about 4-6 hours. The course is designed for you to complete a module per week, but do not worry if you start the course late, or are busy in a certain week, you can catch up.

1.2. Learning Objectives

So, what will you actually learn in this course? At the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Describe what multidisciplinary research is and its associated challenges and opportunities in different disciplines.
• Set up each phase of scientific research: the literature study, the theoretical and conceptual frameworks, the experimental and study design, the choice of research methods and data collection, the data analyses and the interpretation, validation & verification of the results, and discussions of the outcome.
• Understand and select the appropriate methods for a research question in terms of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods including formative and summative evaluations studies.
• Explain and the importance of research ethics, data management, and guidelines for human research ethics in your research design and practice
• Write a research plan for a multidisciplinary case, including formulating a research objective and research questions, research set up, planning, and reflection

2. Course structure

The course is organized around six topics; each a stop on your research journey. Each module is designed to be spread over one week, but you can take longer or shorter if you wish. A brief summary of each topic is presented below. Detailed instructions and resources will be provided during the course.

Module 1: Introduction to Research

In the Getting Started section, you’ll get to know the course structure. First, we will take you through what constitutes Multidisciplinary Scientific Research and how is it used. Next, we explain the structure of research using the scientific method and the engineering design cycle. To avoid confusion when talking about research, we will go into the language of research and define many of the terms used. After that, we will go into what to research and how to find out more about current research trends. With the foundation now laid we move on to the first steps in research methodology: You will learn about research objectives and research questions and how to formulate them.

Module 2: Phases and Methods of Scientific Research

In this module, we continue to build your skills library, starting off with how to create hypotheses from research questions. This is then followed by the first steps in desktop research and literature study as well as how to perform your theoretical modeling and create conceptual frameworks leading onto your experimental/study design and data collection. You will also learn about the importance of evaluation, validation, and verification as well as research ethics and especially Human Resource research ethics.

Module 3: Research method Selection and Study Design

In this module, we will really dive into research methods. Terms such as qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods as well as dependent and independent variables will no longer hold any secrets for you. We will also introduce you to the concept of summative and formative evaluation studies and explain how you can choose a suitable method for your research.

Module 4: Data Collection and Analysis

We continue our focus on data by looking at data collection and data management, qualitative and quantitative data analysis, and data interpretation. You will be carrying out some statistical analysis using the Open-Source Statistics package, Jamovi, and learn how to validate and verify data.

Module 5: Research Management, Documentation and Publishing

During this module, we will take a closer look at how to report research results and in particular multidisciplinary work. We will also address the difference in reporting in different disciplines. In conjunction, we will introduce you to some much-needed project management skills, including Gantt Charts using the Open-Source GanttProject software. The section is concluded by looking at how scientific publishing works including the principles of Open Science.

3. Resources and Tools

All educational resources will be available in the course. They consist of short videos and readings to support you in the completion of the learning activities for each module.

Additionally, there will be some required reading every now and then. All required reading is based on Open Resources that are freely available. For those of you who want to know more, we have also provided recommended reading which may not be available for free.

The statistics software that is used in the course, Jamovi, is an Open-Source software that can be downloaded free from: jamovi.org. For the creation of Gantt Charts, we use GanttProject, an Open-Source software that can be downloaded from: ganttproject.biz.

No special tools will be needed to complete this course.

4. License

The course materials of this course are Copyright Delft University of Technology and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

If you choose to reuse or repost DelftX course materials you must give proper attribution to the original LDE-CEL author(s). Please utilize the following citation “This material was created by or adapted from material posted on the Delftx website, delftx.tudelft.nl, and created by LDE-CEL faculty member (Name), (Title), (Year). DelftX is not responsible for any changes made to the original materials posted on its website and any such changes are the sole responsibility of [name of user/adapter].”

You must also include a copy of the Creative Commons license used by DelftX, with every copy of the TU Delft materials or the derivative work you create from it.