The lecturer as tool-builder: Why methods educators should be creating their own interactive digital resources

Research methods education relies heavily on generic textbooks and institutional platforms, yet the most persistent pedagogical challenges in methods teaching are discipline-specific. This opinion piece argues that the growing accessibility of browser-based development tools, particularly through AI-assisted collaboration, creates opportunity for methods lecturers to design their own interactive teaching resources, embedding pedagogical expertise directly into the tools their students use. Drawing on experience of developing a suite of interactive workbooks for postgraduate research methods education, I describe both the collaborative development process and the pedagogical reasoning that shaped their design. These resources enable students to enter data, explore processes interactively, write reflections, and export completed work, qualitatively different from what slides or textbooks can offer. The proposition is not that every lecturer should adopt my approach, but that every lecturer who teaches methods has pedagogical knowledge worth operationalising, and that the technical barriers to doing so have largely fallen away.