TIES501 Seminar


AUTUMN 2016

Course information

The main purpose of this seminar is to help you in the thesis writing process. The grading of the seminar is pass/fail. The course is mandatory in Master curriculum.

The seminar is equivalent with 5 ECTS, which means 133 hours of work. 30 hours of classes, 60 hours of weekly tasks and 43 hours for preparing the research plan, presentating it and being an opponent for one presentation.

The structure of the seminar aims to follow typical research process and is formulated as following: introduction, related research, methodology, results and discussion. We'll start with general discussions about research and science, explore different strategies for finding a proper thesis topic, and how to present them as an introduction. In related research section, we strengthen our skills related to literature review and memorise, how to write about previous research. Methodological part discusses about quantitative and qualitative research in general and focuses on different data gathering analysis techniques. We learn how to report our results effectively and, finally, how to discuss about our research in the terms of reliability, validity and implications.

Prerequisites

  • Bachelor's degree and master studies in near end phase.
  • Reserve enough time to work on thesis and seminar during autumn.

What to do

  • Active participation to the classes, one missed class == one extra task
  • Mandatory weekly task
  • Make a research plan
  • Present your own topic
  • Opponent one topic
  • 50% of Master Thesis done to get the credits

Learning environment

We are going to use Slack for everything: questions, task returning, discussions, reviewing.

  1. Go to: https://graduseminaari-s2016.slack.com
  2. Domains with @student.jyu.fi can automatically join
  3. Change your name as first name and the first letter of surname if there is people with same name!
  4. Play around, check your settings, add information to your profile and make sure you are in both #general and #problems channels
  5. There are also neat apps for mobile devices

Weekly tasks

File formats and filename conventions

  • Text = PDF
  • Pictures = PNG/JPG
  • Weekly tasks: weekly#_firstname_surname.pdf where # is the number of the week
  • Extra tasks: extra#_firstname_surname.pdf where # is the number of the week

NO Google docs, Word, .tex, .txt you can work with any preferred software, but keep the returned file format consistent -> convert to PDF. Why? Because .pdf can be opened in the browser.

Weekly tasks are returned to Slack and Deadline is always Sunday 23:59!

Extra tasks are only for compensating missed classes without approved reason. e.g., becoming sick is a good reason, but having to work/sleep/play/eat is not. Extra tasks are usually related to the work we were doing in the class.

Initial wishes for the seminar

  • Help with finding references/literature 7
  • Scientific/academic writing 7
  • Focusing the topic / making research questions 5
  • Motivational kicks for the thesis process 5
  • Help with finding a good research topic 3
  • Research methods 2
  • What are the thesis requirements in MIT discipline 2
  • Reference management 1
  • Peer review 1
  • How to write discussion about system development 1
  • How to combine theoretical knowledge with empirical knowledge 1
  • Writing a research plan 1
  • Analysing (test) data 1
  • Making a survey research 1