Research Internship - Alice & Sonja

Alice
Apr 8
4 min read

Is the world of research something for us?

Will it be too theoretical?

What are we actually going to do?

When we, Sonja and Alice, started our internship with the i-MASTER project, we had no idea how much we would learn about the world of maritime education, let alone designing a student-facing learning analytics dashboard for maritime simulation training!

Yet, over the course of four months, we:

Explored new research fields
Ran our own participatory design workshop with maritime students
Designed a dashboard prototype
And even co-authored a paper for the CSCL 2025 conference based on our findings

We can definitely say we are satisfied with our internship experience! 😊

Setting Sail: The i-MASTER Project

The i-MASTER project is a European-funded initiative that aims to enhance maritime training through an intelligent learning system (ILS). Their goal is to provide students and instructors with better feedback and insights into simulation-based learning by incorporating multimodal learning analytics (MMLA).

This was completely unfamiliar territory for us, since we didn’t have any background in maritime education, and terms like "full-mission bridge simulators" and "COLREG" felt like another language.

But that was part of the challenge… and the fun!

Charting Our Course: From Literature to Design

With guidance from our supervisors (shoutout to our rock stars Charlott and Susan 🤘), we kicked off the internship by diving into:

Research on maritime simulation training
Studies on learning analytics dashboards
Literature on feedback in education

One of our biggest takeaways, and what we realized is still a huge challenge, is that data is only useful if it's presented in a way that makes sense to students.

Initially, we planned to design a dashboard for instructors, but after reviewing existing research and speaking with the i-MASTER project partners, we realized that student perspectives were often overlooked. That’s when we pivoted, and our focus became designing an MMLA dashboard that would actually benefit students after simulation training.

Diving In: Running a Participatory Design Workshop

To understand what students really needed from a learning analytics dashboard, we decided to run a participatory design workshop. This meant:

Recruiting maritime students
Facilitating discussions on feedback and learning analytics
Asking students to sketch their ideal dashboard designs

This is where my (Alice), organizational nerdiness thrived! Organizing the workshop was an adventure in itself:

Coordinating the workshop
Securing, setting up and testing the recording equipment
Making sure there was fika (because, priorities ☕🥐)
Ensuring all participants could attend the same session

...there were a lot of moving parts.

But this wouldn’t have been a success without the maritime students. They were incredibly open, participative, interested in trying the eye-tracking gadgets, but also very reflective about their own experiences with feedback, and open to sharing so many insightful thoughts with us.

If you ask yourself why the heck we knew how to do all of this - we didn’t!

At first, at least… when we say we took this step by step, we mean it literally. We read up on a lot of stuff, consulted our third research partner, ChatGPT, and consulted our supervisors. They were especially helpful when testing our PowerPoint presentation and answering the students' questions.

One big aha moment for me, Sonja, was learning about all the technological aspects that go into such a workshop. But we can proudly say that we now know how to mic people up and synchronize audio and film with different cameras from all angles possible.

At this point, we would like to give a shout-out to Oskar, who introduced us to the fascinating (at least for him) world of video observation!

Bringing It All Together: Analysis & Design

After the workshop, we had over 80 pages of transcripts to analyze - luckily, we used WhisperAI to transcribe. Using grounded theory, we:

Identified key themes
Mapped out student needs
Used this input to guide the dashboard design
Refined our ideas based on what students actually wanted

This is where my (Sonja) strength came in - I loved sketching, thinking different ideas through, drawing interfaces, and discussing all this together! While I needed to tune back my perfectionism, we came up with some great ideas that built the base for my master’s thesis.

Final Reflections: What We Learned

So, to summarize... what did we actually do in the internship?

✅ Researched maritime training, learning analytics dashboards & feedback

✅ Personally chose to focus on designing an MMLA dashboard for students

✅ Conducted a participatory design workshop

✅ Learned how to use camera and recording equipment

✅ Transcribed and analyzed qualitative data

✅ Sketched an MMLA dashboard

✅ Conducted user testing

✅ Co-authored a research paper

What we hope students understand is that the research-project internship was much more than just research: it was a hands-on lesson in collaboration, design thinking, and problem-solving in an unfamiliar field.

We learned how to navigate new disciplines, engage with students as co-creators, and apply research to real-world challenges.

Looking back, we both agree that the participatory approach was what made this experience so valuable. Instead of just designing something based on theory, we involved students in the process, ensuring that their voices and needs were at the center of our work.

We highly recommend an internship like this. We know that not all research projects will be the same, but we are so grateful for the freedom and trust we were given. At first, the endless possibilities felt daunting, but teamwork was the key to our success - we kept each other motivated (and sane), learned from one another, and had the full support and encouragement of our supervisors. 🫂

🚨 Master's Thesis Tip Alert 🚨

This experience also provided us with a solid foundation for approaching the master’s thesis, for which we are extremely grateful. It gave us insight into how to design and execute a research project while also giving us early access to participants, relevant topics, and a supportive supervisor. Both of us decided to refocus our initial master thesis plans on a topic within the project.

We were actually able to start our research with a concrete plan on the first day of the semester, which saved us a ton of time and allowed us to do a bit bigger data gathering approaches.

So, if you’re looking for a way to: