The summer semester and Unit 3 of ENGL 301 Technical Writing are both coming to an end, so I am writing another reflection blog to tell you about my experience researching, organizing, and writing the first draft of my formal report.
I had some difficulty recruiting participants for my survey. I posted a link to the survey in a Facebook group and a Piazza page for students in my program (Bachelor of Computer Science), but neither post seemed to attract any attention. Luckily, when I asked friends at UBC directly, quite a lot of them completed the survey. I also emailed 16 of my past and present professors with a link to the survey, and I was pleasantly surprised that half of them promptly completed it. In total, 21 students and eight faculty members completed the survey.
I am glad that I asked numerous open-ended questions in my survey, because they yielded terrific and sometimes richly detailed responses that I could not have anticipated. However, tallying information from these written responses to create quantitative data was a chore. In retrospect, I could have included some multi-select questions to lighten my analytical workload. I also wish that I had asked whether students and faculty members would prefer digital tools to be collected and accessible via a central learning management system. As I wrote the first draft of my formal report, this question became increasingly important. Luckily, I asked other related questions that help to mitigate the absence of a more direct question. Finally, I am glad that I asked survey participants to identify as either students or faculty members, because some of the data collected revealed disparities between the two groups.
While conducting secondary research, I fortunately stumbled upon UBC’s Learning Technology Ecosystem: Developing a Shared Vision, Blueprint & Roadmap. This document included important information that became central to my formal report. Having discovered this document, I decided to pivot away from my original plan of researching scholarly journal articles and learning management systems used by other leading universities. Instead, I focused my secondary research on official UBC websites, the student newspaper (The Ubyssey), and r/UBC (an online community of UBC students, staff, and faculty members).
In organizing my formal report, I was surprised that my initial outline, submitted on July 8, changed as much as it did. From the Introduction, I eliminated definitions, histories, and descriptions with which my intended audience (the User Committee within the Learning Technology Hub) would no doubt be familiar. I also reorganized the Data and Analysis section to better reflect the structure of my survey.
I enjoyed reviewing Geneviève Bolduc’s formal report draft, as it helped me to reflect on my own report. For example, I learned that I should not include an Audience section in the Introduction of my report. My review of Geneviève’s formal report draft is quite long, like the report itself, but the extra effort will be worthwhile if it helps her to make revisions. I am looking forward to revising my own formal report and completing Unit 4 of ENGL 301 Technical Writing.