DEVELOPMENT OF A TRANSFERABLE RESEARCH PORTAL - CREATING AN ON CAMPUS EQUIVALENT FULLY ONLINE RESEARCH COURSE COMPONENT stephen.mckenzie@monash.edu Filia.Garivaldis@monash.edu Kaissidis-RodafinosAngelos matthew.mundy@monash.edu 2017 <p>Monash University’s Graduate Diploma in Psychology – Advanced (GDP-A) is an innovative fully online accredited Fourth Year Psychology course, which enables its students to undertake further specialised professional postgraduate training in psychology. The GDP-A commenced in March 2016 and consists of four course units and four research units presented in alternating six week teaching periods. </p> <p>Many challenges are arising in the development of the GDP-A, which are also opportunities, including the translation of a traditional on campus research project into a fully online mode, the ability to scale from a starting number of 80 students to several hundred students, and the development of clinical and research skills through virtual means. The scale and scope of the GDP-A and its challenges/ opportunities are unprecedented. </p> <p>A particularly great challenge and opportunity for the successful development and implementation of the GDP-A is the need for a fully online research project that is fully equivalent to an on campus research project. This will consist of a research thesis based on the conducting of experiments, surveys, access to or creation of a database and associated statistical analyses. To meet this challenge/opportunity we are developing and implementing a Research Portal.</p> <p>The Research Portal is a unified research environment that is accessible to GDP-A students, and potentially to others users, and is presented in the Moodle online Learning Management System (LMS). The components of the Research Portal are:</p> <p>•      Presentation and selection of innovative and online friendly research topics.</p> <p>•      Access of and contribution to a course specific and a general research participants’ pool.</p> <p>•      Access to online experiments, surveys, tests and databases in a Virtual Lab environment.</p> <p>•      Allocation and tracking of students’ supervisor resource use in student-supervisor shared electronic notebook/data workbook space.   </p> <p>The Research Portal will provide the GDP-A course with an unprecedented online research project conducting capacity that can be successfully transferred across Monash University courses and beyond. </p><p><br></p><p>McKenzie, F. Garivaldis, A. Kaissidis, M. Mundy (2016) DEVELOPING A TRANSFERABLE RESEARCH PORTAL - CREATING AN ON CAMPUS EQUIVALENT FULLY ONLINE RESEARCH COURSE COMPONENT, EDULEARN16 Proceedings, pp. 877-882.<br></p>