Course Overview

The course is designed for fourth year students. Students of this course are expected to develop research proposal on their field of specialisation.

Course Objectives

The objective of the course is to develop the students’ ability to design and present a theoretically-informed research proposal related to a particular policy issue arising from a course or multiple courses of Urban and Rural Planning Discipline. The students will be assessed on two types of output and on some aspects of the process leading to these outputs:

·       We expect the students to write a complete research proposal

·       The students will also be assessed on the quality of public presentations of their argument and on their ability to answer the questions asked by jury members.

·       Among the process aspects the supervisors as well, coordinator of this course can usefully distinguish between aspects of the student’s learning attitude (commitment, independence, punctuality) and the significance of his/her learning process, i.e. the difference between the initial and the final understanding of the issue(s) each student has inquired into.  

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

On the completion of this course, students are expected to be able to:

·       Identify a good research topic/problem in urban and rural planning field;

·       Formulate research questions and also assess its significance in relation to relevant scholarly literatures;

·       Develop conceptual/theoretical framework to analyse empirical evidences;

·       Identify philosophical worldviews and define basic ideas of that worldview;

·       Understand how the worldview shaped their approach to research; 

·        Design research methodology and detailed data collection and analysis methods;

·       Develop competency in framing, timetabling and development of a research proposal;

·       Develop skill to successfully communicate research proposal