Data collection methods without fieldwork I am a graduate student in education who recently had a child. I have devised a few plans/topics that would work for my thesis but I keep revisiting them because they require a lot of data collection in the field, something I am not sure I will be able to achieve with a young baby at home and no babysitter/daycare for now. 

So here I am, trying to come up with various data collection methods that could work without having to be in the field:


Giving directions to a research assistant and paying them to do it
for me
Interviews through Skype
Surveys
Self-reports
Document analysis


What would be other viable options that I haven’t listed?
Depending on your topic, consider working with an existing dataset. I highly doubt that would be frowned upon in an M.A. situation - you only have so much time to get things done!

I see you're in Ed Tech, so you have a lot to choose from. Most MOOCs provide open data you could work with (for example, see Harvard and MIT's Dataverse). The LAK conference is also an excellent resource for learning analytics datasets. Finally, there are also some governments that are providing open data pertaining to education, such as Queensland in AU.

But even if you can't find an existing dataset that provides the information you're looking for, the strategies you mentioned can all be used highly successfully. My own MSc thesis in Learning &amp; Technology is one example. I designed a study where I combined an online survey with sentiment analysis to understand the role of personality in a set of online courses provided by large university. Never had to leave my laptop :)