Approved June 2024

DRG Basics

Credit hours and teaching responsibilities 

Tenure-track faculty are expected to offer at least 1 Directed Research Group (DRG) per year as part of their teaching responsibilities. Teaching track faculty whose primary teaching assignment is managed by HCDE can optionally offer 1 DRG in lieu of a course every other year.

All faculty may offer more than the minimum, but no compensation beyond standard salary can be provided (i.e., no excess compensation or summer salary, though when DRGs align with sponsored research, faculty might offer DRGs as part of grant-funded external work).

DRGs should be scoped so that students can commit for one quarter at a time, even if the work spans multiple quarters. Even if a student wants to participate for multiple quarters, conflicts, such as the scheduling of a required course in a subsequent quarter, may prevent that.

DRG instructors should center student learning in the design and conduct of DRGs, rather than turning to them as a source of labor as research.

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To facilitate students matching to DRGs and planning their path to graduation, DRG descriptions should be posted as early as feasible, ideally by the date registration opens (see academic calendars). This is unlikely to be feasible for fall quarter, for which registration opens in spring, and so we recommend 1 August postings for autumn DRGs.

Please use the DRG Posting Template and send your copy to the HCDE Communications Manager for posting to the HCDE website.

Notifying students 

Faculty should notify students initially selected for a DRG and confirm the DRG meeting time as early in registration as feasible, and no later than the first day of instruction. Selection of a meeting time can cause students to need to change their plans for the DRG or course, and delays in this can create opportunity- and financial-costs for students. Instructors offering undergraduate DRGs in Winter or Spring quarter should also bear in mind that times that conflict with HCDE 492 or HCDE 493 will mean that graduating seniors are unable to participate; we recommend that instructors consider alternate times that would allow seniors to participate whenever possible.

Example key dates
 

Registration 

Faculty should prioritize participation in DRGs by students who can register for credits commensurate with their effort and learning experience. While there may be some situations in which a student may participate without registration (see guidance for examples), these should be rare and limited only to situations in which you would otherwise work with that student on a volunteer, not for credit basis and you should not reduce opportunities for for-credit students to accommodate a non-registered student.  

Who may offer DRGs 

DRGs must be supervised by a faculty member with a primary or adjunct appointment in HCDE. Affiliate faculty, PhD students, and potentially others may co-lead a DRG under the supervision of a faculty member. The frequency and depth of supervision may depend on the co-instructor’s previous experience, but, at a minimum, shall consist of reviewing the description for the DRG before it is posted, consulting on which students are accepted, reviewing the plan for the DRG before the beginning of the quarter, a mid-quarter check-in, and responsibility for submitting grades for DRG participants. 

When PhD students co-offer a DRG with faculty, and that DRG is related to a student’s employment (e.g., RAship), the PhD student should either not register for credit or the student and the faculty mentor / supervisor should develop a plan for distinguishing between their for-credit and for-pay effort. 

DRG Guidance & Best Practices

Steps to a successful DRG – for you and for students.

Planning your DRG

What works well in a DRG

In DRGs, students can engage in a variety of ways. Some DRGs might look more like reading groups or seminars, others might look like a lab group with several related but distinct projects, and others might function as a large project team.

Because DRGs vary so much, it is important to clarify expectations for the format of the DRG when advertising (see below) and beginning the DRG.

The flexibility of DRGs is one of its key benefits! However, with that flexibility comes difficulty in determining the scope, especially for faculty who are new to offering DRGs. It’s important to set expectations in the beginning about what can be accomplished in a single quarter. For many students, a DRG is their first introduction to research, so you may need to have a lot of explaining to do on things like what research questions are, how to do a literature review, how to get IRB approval, etc. Some highly successful DRGs have often come in with research questions, methods, and an IRB approval already in place and students all work to execute on the methods. Some activities can work particularly well, such as coding (using a code book), a reading group, or exploratory research, or developing many prototypes in parallel. Other successful DRGs will just spend the entire quarter exploring and scoping different research questions on a topic. Another possible model is having a DRG do a systematic literature review. 

Other activities can be challenging. For example, open coding tends to be very difficult to do well in a DRG unless you have invested considerable time in bringing the research group together to develop a shared understanding of the research aims and related work. DRG participants can also contribute to conducting interviews, but it helps to scaffold this carefully, including readings and other activities to build a shared understanding of research goals, co-developing or refining the interview protocol, and doing the first few interviews together or reviewing them in the DRG. 

DRG sizes

While our policy describes expected credits and number of students across an individual faculty member’s DRGs in an academic year, there is no set size for each DRG. One advantage of DRGs over independent studies is they can reduce fragmentation of faculty attention, so too many small DRGs may undo that potential benefit. 

Large DRGs can also mean that you spend more time coordinating everyone’s efforts than actually engaging in the research or scholarship. When recruiting, plan for what activities will happen and how they can reasonably be divided among participants and use that to set minimum and maximum sizes.

Meeting rooms

Faculty can also request to book out a room in the HCDE room reservation system. If a suitable room cannot be located there, faculty should coordinate with the departmental Program Coordinator for Academic Services to locate a suitable room. 

Advertising DRGs

To post a DRG, please use the DRG Posting Template to prepare a description of the DRG and email it to the department communications manager, who will post on the HCDE website (see key dates in policy). Setting expectations for a successful DRG includes how you advertise it.

The best DRG descriptions will: 

• Describe the DRG topic and both short-term (end of quarter) and long-term goals of the work
• List what competencies you hope (some) students will bring to the DRG and what competencies the DRG will support students in developing. With peer instruction, these lists may overlap!
• Say what products the students will produce as part of the DRG (e.g., a study protocol, design ideas, a paper)
• If the DRG leadership is shared with a faculty member and PhD student, indicate who will be present day-to-day
• If the meeting time is known, indicate that. We strongly encourage you to set a time before advertising the DRG to avoid a scheduling nightmare; if you have students continuing from a previous quarter, you might work with them to determine a time before advertising it.
• Describe the format (e.g., meetings, individual work) and estimated hours per week (with variation per number of credits, as applicable)
• Specify a date by which you intend to make and communicate initial selection. See recommended key dates in the policy, but for your own needs, you may want to be earlier.

Members of the department have found it helpful to have students indicate their interest in a survey that includes contact information, their goals and interest for the DRG, what skills they bring, what skills they hope to develop learn, their major / program, if they will commit to registering for credit, and any scheduling considerations. This form can also be an opportunity to ask applicants whether they need DRG credits in order to graduate this year, which may inform your decision of who to prioritize.

Selecting students

Faculty should prioritize students enrolled in HCDE programs and who will register for credit. BS students are required to have experiential learning credits (which DRGs can count toward), and PhD students are required to have 10 credits to graduate. MS students can optionally also count up to 2 credits toward graduation and some may need 2-credit opportunities to reach full enrollment (10 credits) as most MSHCDE courses are 4 credits. Additionally, for all students, DRGs can be a highlight of their HCDE experience. 

We recognize there may be exceptions, such as:

• Including a student who was enrolled in the DRG in a previous quarter and wants to continue contributing but cannot afford to register or who may have graduated
• Including a student who has necessary expertise for the success of the project but faces barriers to registration. (In this situation, consider talking with advising staff to see if there are workarounds to registration barriers.) 
• Including students from other programs to round out the expertise to support the work and learning experience for all students in the DRG
• Including students who have not yet placed in a major as a way of gaining exposure to HCDE, so long as they are prepared to learn through the experience. You should not imply or communicate to students that their participation and/or performance in the DRG affects their chances of admission to HCDE.

Additionally, be wary of students who do not want to register because they are at their credit limit. These students are often very busy and may be more likely to ghost you or drop key DRG commitments starting in week five as other courses pick up. Consider only including these students if you would let them volunteer for your research anyway, and as additional members of the DRG (as they do not count toward any credit hour expectations). 

DRGs are experiential learning experiences not sources of labor, and organizers should select students who will learn through the DRG.

Discontinuing applications

DRG instructors should close applications in your Google Form and notify the Communications Manager when the DRG is full so that the webpage can be updated to indicate the group is no longer accepting applications.

Registering students

Once you have selected students, the following steps should be followed to ensure that students are properly registered. 

1. Send each accepted student a faculty code and confirm how many credits they should register for. Faculty may find their faculty code on the HCDE Intranet. If students have questions about how to register, have them work with the academic services team. 
2. Check MyUW to confirm that they’ve registered and have registered for the appropriate number of credits. You may need to follow up. Some students may try to hold a place in your DRG while hoping to join another.
3. If you plan to use Canvas:
   • The Canvas site for the course will not appear until a student has registered.  
   • You may end up with multiple sections in Canvas - you can combine them using this procedure. If you are running multiple DRGs in the same quarter, you may find that you have students from different DRGs in the same Canvas section; in that situation, it is often easiest to request a new Canvas site if you want one. 

Sample registration email

Congratulations...(add language about your DRG, including information about meeting times)...Register for X credit(s) with faculty code: xxxxx (your instructor code), in the course section assigned to your program.

• If you are a undergraduate student, please register for HCDE 496 A SLN xxxxx
• If you are an HCDE Master’s student, register for HCDE 596 B SLN xxxxx
• If you are a PhD student, register for HCDE 596 A SLN xxxxx

Students can register for multiple DRGs but must register for different sections. SLNs are listed in the UW Time Schedule, or contact askhcde@uw.edu for assistance.

Checking which students are registered

Managing who is registered is tricky, since students in different DRGs may appear all in the same section in MyUW, and students in the same DRG may appear in different sections, and across 496s and 596s. It’s also easy for students to accidentally register for the wrong section or number of credits. Around week one of the quarter, it’s a great idea to compare who is registered with who you expect to be registered and resolve any differences.  

If you are co-offering a DRG with a PhD student and/or another faculty member, you must coordinate on this step (especially if students registered with different faculty member’s faculty codes).

Grades

DRGs are graded as credit/no credit. It is up to you to determine what is the minimum amount of participation needed to earn credit. If you have students in the same group participating for different numbers of credits (not recommended), you might consider having some components depend on the number of credits (e.g., for a DRG conducting interviews, they have to conduct and code the same number of interviews as number of credits for which they are registered)

It’s easy to forget to submit DRG grades, especially in quarters when you may otherwise not be teaching. Consider setting a reminder.

DRG member participation in the publication process

For DRGs engaged in research, members may hope to participate in the publication process, especially if they are considering doctoral programs or are curious about that aspect of scientific communication. Others may want to prioritize a portfolio piece they can share in job searches. It helps to talk about this early and often, as well as how it may require work beyond the end of the quarter and/or beyond the credit hours. For example, ACM authorship guidelines require that every author have a chance to edit submitted and final manuscripts.

Generally, we encourage being inclusive in authorship and giving everyone who has contributed (or may contribute) to the intellectual framing of the work an opportunity to be an author, and to revisit that if their priorities shift. We also encourage including all DRG participants in the acknowledgements section if not co-authors.

Some publication venues give other ways to reflect different levels of authorship - e.g., contribution statements, or a group author (such as “Speculative Enactments DRG Members”) - that you may wish to consider. 

Other references: 

• Fostering a Culture of Openness and Transparency with Institutional Authorship Policies. Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science.

Reporting DRGs on Faculty CVs

Examples of how faculty can report DRGs on CVs for merit review.

Example 1 - combined per quarter

Supervision of Directed Project Groups
 

Example 2 - separated by topic

You can use my.uw to look up student credit hours (SCHs) for past DRGs, but, in quarters when you offered multiple DRGs, it may be impossible to disambiguate in which group students were - see example of merged SCHs for winter 2024 below.

Supervision of Directed Project Groups