This course includes the following eleven lectures. They are all available as videos on Canvas except the first, and you can watch them whenever you want. Their place (except the first live campus introduction lecture) in the schedule is a suggestion of when you might view it.
- Introduction and scientific knowledge (given live on campus)
- Scientific inferences (59 minutes)
- Observation and measurement (76 minutes)
- Experiments (49 minutes)
- Models (62 minutes)
- Statistics (62 minutes)
- Explanations and causes (81 minutes)
- Engineering design (76 minutes)
- Qualitative methods (93 minutes)
- Research Ethics (103 minutes)
- Anticipating risk in science and engineering (85 minutes)
From the second lecture onward, there is an associated quiz of 15 questions. If you complete the quiz with at least 14 points, you will get bonus points on the exam. You can attempt to complete the quiz as many times as you like until it closes. This quiz closes at the end of the week where the lecture is scheduled (Sunday, 23:59, of each week). This is to incentivise studying throughout the course, rather than only at the end. Bonus points collected during this period are valid for the exam and the re-exam belonging to this period.
There are also two (non obligatory) flipped classroom sessions which also gives bonus points for each session, where students get a chance and are encouraged to ask questions about different lectures. Flipped classroom 1 is about Lecture 2. and 3. Flipped classroom is about Lecture 4. and 5.
If all the quizes and the the two flipped classrooms are completed one get a maximum of 5 bonus points on the exam.
This course includes these four mandatory seminars.
- Definitions, operationalizations and hypotheses (course week 3)
- Designing a scientific study (course week 4)
- Interpretation, analysis, and evidence (course week 6)
- Research ethics (course week 7).
For each seminar, there are texts to read and a quiz to complete before you take the seminar. You need at least 14 points on the quiz before attending. If you attend without having scored at least 14 points on the quiz, you are not sufficiently prepared, and you will not be marked as attending. You can take the quiz as many times as you want before your seminar.
You will take one seminar each seminar week. You join a seminar group on Canvas, under the heading “People”. If you cannot see the heading, make sure you have registered. You will then take the rest of the seminars with this group, the same day of the week and the same time of day each week. You are welcome to join a seminar group that is not in your own schedule, but contact the teacher for that seminar before you do and check that it is OK. There is more information about the seminars in the document “Seminar information” on Canvas.
This course also inlcudes a project part, which consists of four mandatory project part essay submissions and three peer-reviews of other students submissions. The first two submissions are done individually, and the last two (a preliminary version of the essay, and the final version) are done together with other students from your master programme. If there are too few students, you will submit an individually written project part essay.
In the project part you will work with a published scientific article from your field of study (which we provide). You will first make a poularized presentation of one concept from the article, and peer review other students' texts. You will then do a methodological evaluation of the article and point out methodological strengths and methodological weaknesses of the text, and peer review other students' texts. You will then join forces and work in groups of 2-5 students and write a text where you popularize the content of the article for a general audience, as well as dicuss all strengths and weaknessess of the article. You then individually peer review other students' submissions and use the feedback you get to revise your text into a final, fourth submission. More detailed information can be found on canvas.