ABSTRACT
The essence of the approach is on-the-job training: build a small team of advanced graduate students and treat them as peers in a collaborative research project. A collaborative research course has two types of objectives: technical and professional development. The most attractive components of the course objectives were the opportunities to work on a collaborative project, to wrestle with a topic with direct applications in conservation ecology, and to produce a potentially significant and broad reaching publication in a short period of time. The team develops a very strong sense of ownership for the research and expects to have a say in its ultimate direction. The quantitative results and associated written comments make it clear that students valued these courses primarily for the emphasis on collaborating to address a real-world problem. Depending on the technical objectives, some attention to facilitation and conflict resolution might be appropriate.
