That doesn’t give SI and other programs a free pass on tackling the issue, though. My critique is about more than the number of opportunities*, it’s also about the way in which some courses present research methods to users that makes me uncomfortable.

I applaud the way that CSCW (SI689) exposes SI students to the intersection of research and practice. Masters students complete a semester-long practical project (most often an evaluation of an existing CSCW system), yet the day-to-day discussion in class is tied primarily to published research. Additionally, students are twice asked to critique a paper. I believe that students leave this course understanding that current research often does apply to CSCW product design. They also know that while they may not have substantial research training, they can still pick up papers and ask questions about the findings.

This does not always happen. There are also courses that sometimes place “research” on an unreachable pedestal for students and suggest that the best that practitioners can achieve is a haphazard, rushed approach, the sort of approach that leads to data too noisy to use in practice. We should expect a level of rigor appropriate for the task, whether it is academic research or product design.

There are also specific bits and pieces training associated with particular methods that I still feel are lacking. I’ll go back to human subjects training. During 501, SI asks all students to interview people in outside organizations. Students should receive training and have the opportunity to discuss the ethics and risks associated with these activities at least at the level of the basic modules in eresearch.

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*Since the fall, I’ve substantially reevaluated my position on research opportunities for masters students at SI. They exist — both with faculty members and PhD students — in reasonable quantities, and I think it is okay that students have to work a bit to find one. There is always room for improvement, particularly in making existing opportunities visible, but on the balance, SI does alright in this respect.

It is not that professors don’t want their students involved in research. It generally has more to do with the fact that there are enormous pressures on professors to produce research at a fast pace.

The accreditation issue is an interesting problem outside of the iSchools too. With my previous institution being new, we were super-worried about ABET acceditation (more so than we should have been). If you imagined the possible space in which you could create a new engineering school’s curriculum, it’d be this big cloud. Adding ABET constraints would draw a smaller circle within that cloud, and then our fears and efforts to be responsible went and put us in a smaller box within that circle within that cloud. I don’t know enough about SI yet to be able to tell if any of that is happening here, but now I’m wondering.

The challenge of incentivizing PIs to train masters students to be good researchers only to watch them graduate as soon as they are ready is very real, and I think figuring out how to best do that is a topic worthy of some serious conversation. I think at least part of the answer will extend back to undergraduate preparation for this sort of work.

I’ve used a somewhat sloppy definition of research (or perhaps no definition at all) here, so I want to clarify that a bit. I think that the universal minimum for SI graduates should be an ability to engage with and question the methods used in their disciplines. This can be achieved outside of more traditional research projects through course projects, so long as students are encouraged to try variations of methods and discuss what did and did not work, and why.

Beyond that minimum, we should endeavor to help anyone who wants a more traditional research experience to be part of their education find a way. On an individual level, this seems to happen pretty well at SI. Institutionally, though, I don’t think that this is really part of what we value (yet).

I’ve also noticed the occassional attitude that masters students are unable or unwilling to participate in research, which definitely makes me feel a bit sad. I think there’s a trend in higher education of underestimating students — this was influenced quite a bit by my undergraduate experiences, and I’ll quote Olin President Rick Miller’s testimony before the Spelling Commission on student capabilities:

Students are more capable than expected. Perhaps the most important conclusion we reached in our experimentation with bright engineering students is that they are far more capable of independent learning in truly challenging situations than we expected. During the “Olin Partner Year” when 30 students worked closely with our founding faculty on educational experiments, we found that students rarely failed to achieve specific results under pressure when challenged to do so in small teams. We also found that they make highly responsible and remarkably mature and insightful colleagues in making important fundamental decisions in many aspects of the educational enterprise. We suspect that students are frequently under-estimated as partners in the educational process in other institutions. Furthermore, when students are better challenged and given real responsibilities, they appear to become much more engaged in their own learning process, learn faster and more deeply, and become more committed to completing the program.

For example, we asked five students who had recently graduated from high school (but had never taken a college course) to design, build, and demonstrate a pulse oximeter (a medical instrument for measuring the oxygen content and pulse rate of a patient’s blood) within five weeks. They had never heard of the instrument, but were eager to attempt the challenge… Within five weeks they produced a working prototype that calibrated well against a hospital instrument! In the process, they not only learned enough about the device to build and operate one, but they achieved an enormous sense of achievement and genuinely enjoyed the intense experience. None of the students were fooled into believing that they had learned all they need to be electrical engineers, but instead they now have a heightened sense of curiosity and interest about transistors and circuit design that tend to motivate them later in courses in this area.

As a result of this and many similar experiences, we developed a teambased project-centered educational approach at Olin College that is a little like learning to “swim in the deep end.” Each semester students spend at least 25% of their time in team-based design/build projects in which they are expected to “do” first and then “learn” later. More traditional approaches in engineering have assumed that students need several years of prerequisite course material in physics, math, and circuit design before attempting any such challenging projects.

The principle of engaging students in learning by discovery is now deeply woven into the fabric of the Olin educational environment…

…I suspect the principle is generalizable beyond engineering to other disciplines as well. Bright and creative students love a challenge, and appear to be far more capable of success in challenging situations than is typically assumed.

Miller’s testimony digresses beyond the topic of this discussion– whether or not masters students’ ability to research is underestimated — but I think it’s quite illustrative of what students can do when turned loose on a problem.

Like Noor, I’ve also heard the (absurd) opinion that MSI students aren’t interested in/capable of research. That’s a circular problem with not having/receiving research training, and I think also partly an outcome of the professional focus of the program. I get the impression that this is an issue everywhere, not just at SI. In any case, I’m going to politely disagree with your opinion that everyone should eat research vegetables, as (let’s be honest) many of students are in for credentialling and those folks don’t need another barrier to becoming professionals; the requirement of an expensive degree is quite enough.