As part of my Action Research Project, I designed and distributed an online questionnaire to tutors teaching across Year 1 and Year 2. The purpose of this blog post is to document the design of this questionnaire as a data collection tool, outline the ethical considerations that informed its structure, and highlight the limitations that shaped its final scope.
The questionnaire was conceived as a mapping exercise rather than an evaluative one. Its primary aim was to build a clearer picture of current tutor practices, confidence levels, and constraints in relation to technical and digital support, to better understand how technical resource interacts with design development in the early years of study.
Ethical considerations and anonymity
Several ethical decisions significantly shaped the final structure of the questionnaire. Initially, I considered including questions about tutors’ contractual status and working patterns, with a “prefer not to say” option. However, given the small size of the teaching cohort, I ultimately removed these questions. Even with anonymity options, combining contract type, teaching year, and specific responses would have made deductive disclosure likely. I therefore decided that full anonymity should take precedence over collecting potentially useful contextual data.
The only contextual question retained was the year group taught. In hindsight, I underestimated how identifying this could be, as only one tutor teaches across both Year 1 and Year 2. This reinforced the importance of caution when collecting even minimal demographic data in small institutional settings. To mitigate this, a “prefer not to say” option was included and explicitly referenced in the deductive disclosure and consent note accompanying the questionnaire.
Mapping current practices and confidence
The core of the questionnaire focused on understanding tutors’ confidence in supporting students across the different technical areas covered by the technical team. This was not intended to assess competence, but rather to identify where tutors feel confident intervening for themselves and where they rely on specialist support.
An important consideration here was time. Tutorials are typically limited to around 20 minutes, and even when tutors possess technical knowledge, this format may not allow for meaningful technical support alongside design discussion. The questionnaire therefore, aimed to surface where technical barriers begin to interfere with design development rather than to attribute responsibility.
Another area of focus was signposting. I was interested in whether tutors felt confident directing students toward additional technical support, including one-to-one tutorials and workshops. Signposting is currently fragmented across platforms, and for tutors working limited days and unpaid outside teaching hours, navigating these systems can be challenging. While some questions around this were ultimately removed for ethical reasons, the issue remains central to understanding patterns of resource use and underuse.
Timing, scale, and limitations
Questions about timing were included to identify whether there are particular moments in the academic calendar where technical support is most needed. This was important given the impracticality of embedding additional technical staff into all sessions. I also asked tutors to estimate how many students they felt would benefit from enhanced support, to test whether isolated interventions would be sufficient or whether more structural changes might be required.
Actions and next steps
Initial findings have already informed practical actions, including the escalation of mental health training needs through the union and the cross referencing of technical deliveries with Year 1 and 2 timetables to develop a clearer support map.
Future research could extend this work to Year 3. However, this cohort was deliberately excluded, as technical provision operates differently, with students expected to work more independently and tutors typically holding less technical and more theoretical expertise. This distinction suggests that a separate investigation would be needed rather than a direct extension of the current questionnaire.