Hi Linda,
To try to answer your question, I'm going to recycle a message I sent
off-list to Natasha Artemeva at Carleton yesterday when she e-mailed me
with a similar question after seeing my post to CASLL. Hope this is
useful. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to send them
along.
Graham
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The general consensus here at Purdue, from all parties that you talk to,
is that student class projects involving outside clients don't require
an application to our IRB as long as the work is part of the curriculum
and the outcome for the students is just a grade. On one of the Purdue
human subjects forms I sent you it states that all Purdue *employees"
must abide by the human subjects regulations. Perhaps that's a
distinction underlying the consensus I mention--employees versus
students.
I should say too, that I'm not talking about student projects that are
labeled as "research" (such as graduate theses or dissertations). In our
undergraduate Professional Writing classes, we have "client projects"
that involve taking on a documentation or communication task of some
kind for a client and completing related work for the client. We don't
foreground the "research" part of this, as we would in graduate student
field research.
Another thought: Here in the US, "service learning" is really big.
Students in schools everywhere are involved doing these kinds of
projects. If each and every time a student or team of students was going
to take on a service project for a client such as a nonprofit
organization, they had to apply to the IRB for human subjects approval,
the whole service learning movement would be stopped dead in its tracks.
Hope this is helpful.
Graham
-----------------------------------
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Linda Schofield wrote:
>
> Thank you so much everyone for your feedback. This has been very helpful.
>
> Could I ask, Graham, about institutions you know of in the US where the
> field work we've been discussing takes place? I ask because university
> websites often don't provide enough detailed information for me to know
> whether or not this kind of research is being done in undergraduate courses.
> In fact, now that I think about it, though many of our instructors
> (particularly in International Business Communication) have field-work-based
> assignments, you would never know it looking at the course description
> in the calendar.
>
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To leave the list, send a SIGNOFF CASLL command to
[log in to unmask] or, if you experience difficulties,
write to Russ Hunt at [log in to unmask]
For the list archives and information about the organization,
the annual conference, and publications, go to the Inkshed Web site at
http://www.StThomasU.ca/inkshed/
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