Please see attached.
ASSIGNMENT
Word count : 3000 – 3500
1.A French luxury-goods conglomerate that designs, manufactures, distributes, and sells jewellery, leather goods, and watches has an extensive set of internal training programmes, each of which is formally assessed. The company wants to reduce the size of the overall training budget using e-learning but is concerned as to whether it will affect customer service and the staff learning and morale using this mechanism.
Depending on your personal area of interest, develop a research problem with a handful of variables from the above-mentioned broad topic, and formulate it into a set of interesting research questions (of your choice).
[top tip – keep this quite simple. For example, what type of learning tools and approaches creates more satisfied employees? How will this approach affect customer service, Financial or non-financial benefits for staff and the company (e.g. staff engagement, cost of eLearning, time away from workplace etc)?]
2.Conduct a focused review of the literature concerning the topic, in line with these research questions, and use it to produce a visual model that could be tested.
3.As discussed in the session, clearly stipulate what your hypotheses might be. You only need to state the ‘alternative’ hypotheses.
4.With your topic and model in mind, identify and then justify your chosen research methodology (i.e. qualitative versus quantitative, but also experiments versus questionnaires).
5.Design an appropriate questionnaire (approx two sides) to address the research questions and discuss the factors that have been deliberately considered while designing the questionnaire to ensure that reliability and validity are the best they can be.
6.There is no data collection required; however, the student might wish to suggest (briefly) some of the steps that will be taken once the data is collected.
7.Describe any of the possible limitations of your study.
8.Outline any possible ethical concerns that will be managed throughout the research.
9.Cite the full bibliographic references that you have cited in your research proposal using APA 7th edition and order them alphabetically.
10.Include a table of contents.
11.Use Times New Roman, Font size 12, 1.5 spacing.
Recommended Outline
Introduction: Provide an introduction to the assignment. (approx. 150 words) e.g. “In the following pages a research proposal will be outlined to address if [insert research problem]”.
Research Problem Definition: Problem definition and objectives (approx. 200 words) Following the 5 ‘W’s’ to develop your thinking, briefly state the final research problem followed by 2-4 possible research questions. e.g. Does switching to e-learning reduce costs and/or leads to higher individual productivity
Literature Review (approx. 800 words)
Key definitions for your focal variables (e.g. what exactly is eLearning training and what is the benefit of eLearning, has anyone studied the benefits, advantages and disadvantages of eLearning What did they find?). Identify the clear research gap (what do people not know?) and draw your model.
Hypotheses (approx. 150 words)
State the alternative (working) hypothesis (Hi) for each prediction in your model in the simplest of terms.
Research Methods (approx. 800 words)
Outline ‘what you will do to answer the research questions and why (i.e. why will you use quantitative research and why is a survey the right choice?).
Even though we haven’t spoken much about this – how will you collect the data, and with whom? (e.g. postal surveys, online survey, etc?).
Questionnaire Design (approx. 700 words)
Insert your questionnaire and then briefly explain why you have made some of the decisions (e.g. “care has been take to avoid any questions that may be seen as ambiguous, by….”).
Research Analysis (approx. 200 words)
Outline what software will be used to analyse the data and describe the steps you might take (e.g. the data will be cleaned in Excel ready for statistical analysis).
Limitations and ethical concerns (approx. 400 words)
Use bullet points to suggest some of the possible limitations you might face with potential solutions.
Conclusions and Bibliography (remainder)