A Fully Online Research Portal

The School of Psychological Sciences’ Graduate Diploma of Psychology Advanced (GDPA) is the first fully-online Fourth Year Psychology course at Monash. The GDPA has received professional accreditation from the Australian Psychology Accreditation Council and currently has almost 600 enrolled students, with numerous graduates who have successfully entered professional psychology careers, as well as PhD programs in top-tier universities.

In the past, it has been unfeasible to offer an online course which includes a substantial research component, such as the GDPA, without a successful online research capacity. Online courses that involve hands-on research also have a limitation to expansion due to a sense of the incompatibility of online methods with some aspects of traditional pedagogy. These can include the need to build, and maintain rapport between students and educators in order to create an effective learning environment.

Capitalising on the benefits of online learning and overcoming the challenges, our team developed a fully online Research Portal. The Research Portal evolved to make an online research thesis project possible. It provides a key learning resource, allowing our students to conduct and participate in all aspects of the research workflow and lifecycle, remotely.

We wanted to provide GDPA students with a continuously evolving and unique learning platform, including software access, storage and associated materials. We also wanted to make this portal transferable to any course that requires hands-on research experience for students.

The Research Portal was developed by an innovative collaboration between eResearch, eSolutions and the GDPA. We teamed up with a highly specialised and inspirational team to discuss the concept, its requirements, the feasibility plan and our future aspirations for the portal.

Our key requirements included:

• Capacity for students and other users to access the portal via a simple web link.
• Detailed guidance on producing each of the components of a research project.
• Capacity for students and their supervisors to schedule, conduct, and record project meetings, and store detailed project notes and lab book information, as well as secure data storage and manuscript drafts.
• Ability to rapidly select and recruit research participants, and access to an online research participant pool.
• Capacity to select and/or create measurement tools, and to acquire research data by conducting and contributing to the development of online experiments, surveys, and databases.
• Capacity to manage and analyse data.

The key feature which got us all excited was the development and integration of Virtual Lab (vLab). This was a new way for students to access the specialised software and applications they need, on their own device at no cost anywhere and anytime. The initial version of vLab (now known as MoVE) was created to support the Research Portal. It enabled online research data collection, analysis, and storage to be conducted within a single online environment.

Based on both student feedback and education research evaluation, our team has been substantially refining and improving the portal since its preliminary version went live.

SETU scores for the three GDPA research project units that the Research Portal directly supports, have been consistently high and usage of the Research Portal has grown steadily since its implementation.

In addition, the summary results of an evaluation completed has subsequently been used to inform ongoing refinement of this pedagogical innovation:

• 100% of the supervisors and 71% of the students who completed the portal System Usability Scale questionnaire agreed that they would like to use the system frequently.
• 88% and 71% of GDPA supervisors and students respectively agreed that functions in the Research Portal were well integrated.

The development of the Research Portal commenced with an overall plan, produced as a working text document, which specified the needs that the Portal had to meet and the components (facilitated by user stories), identified by a business analyst, that would be necessary to meet these needs.

This plan was disseminated to various stakeholders, who have contributed to the operationalization of the Research Portal plan. This plan was operationalized as an integrated operating environment and created as a prototype working website. Using Squiz matrix the prototype system was then further developed and refined and became the Research Portal front end.

To create your own portal, complete the following steps:

	Assess the specific needs of your students. Understanding students' needs through creating user stories has been quite useful for us. Clearly articulate your needs and what you aspire to achieve from such a resource.
	Contextualise the portal for your own setting. Visit the Psychology Research Portal to see how our portal looks and works. Stocktake the pages within the portal and decide which ones are relevant for your students.
	Create a site map and wifi diagrams for a visual prototype of the portal and pilot it with the end users (your students). Identify the gaps and make a plan to make those changes.
	Obtain permission to duplicate the Research Portal site by requesting it from the School of Psychological Sciences and work with eSolutions to make a copy of the portal for your department.
	Once it is copied over, make necessary changes to suit your specific needs. Training in the Squiz matrix will be beneficial as you make changes to the portal.
	Get support from the eSolutions team to host the portal on the Monash server.
	When the portal is up and running make exclusive links to the Portal in your Moodle content so your students know about it and can easily access it.
	Set up the portal analytics to monitor its usage and to make any refinements if needed.

The Research Portal project has allowed the creation of a new pedagogical practice, supporting the completion of a research project in the fully online mode, and is an important and transferable online teaching and learning resource. The biggest challenge in its creation was envisioning such a tool, especially the virtual Lab component back in 2016. Collaboration with the right people who shared the same vision was instrumental in achieving our goal. Once we had the right team it was easy to iteratively develop such innovation to meet the needs of our course.

The development of the Research Portal is an important teaching innovation that has required substantial educational leadership and scholarship and has been guided by education first principles, including the need for its users to achieve and benefit from academic excellence, via academic excellence of its components, as well as to achieve pedagogical excellence in the Research Portal user’s experience, information, and instructions.

The development process required close collaboration of academic and IT staff, who together developed the user flow design and successive versions of the Research Portal, and on an ongoing basis provide technical support to users. Technical development, in particular, needed to be led by academic staff with a deep understanding of its purpose and potential. Staff also needed an ongoing capacity to convey this understanding to the technical development teams, and to direct development based on achieving optimal educational as well as technical outcomes, whilst ensuring these outcomes were based on scholarship.

We are now looking at integration of features such as the use of chatbot and integrating H5P activities that further improve user experience and utility. You might like to integrate some of these features right from the beginning.