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Degree Content : Compulsory Courses

The Doctor of Education degree is a postgraduate program involving part-time study over 4 to 6 years.

The program is based on 540 doctoral credits, with 180 assigned to the Stage 1 taught element which will take 2 years to complete. The taught Courses are designed to scaffold students into conducting and reporting on an original and substantive piece of research. Each Course involves a blended learning model, including intensive periods on campus during October and February, and is assessed via a 6,000-word written assignment modelled on, and ideally culminating in, a publishable output.

Outside the intensive campus sessions, students are supported via a mix of synchronous and asynchronous online activities. On successful completion of the taught stage, students move to Stage 2, the 360-credit thesis stage, working closely with a supervisory team of two-three experienced academics to complete an original piece of research over 2 to 4 years.

Stage 1

Course 1: Identifying and Articulating Issues in Professional Practice

Credits: 45

This Course will help you to begin your research journey through a series of critical reflections on your professional biography in order to identify and articulate particular researchable issues in your professional practice.

Course 2: Contextualising Issues in Professional Practice

Credits: 45

In this Course, you will identify the links between a researchable professional issue and its wider contexts. This could include sociological, historical/temporal, geographic/spatial and policy/institutional dimensions of context.

Course 3: Researching Issues in Professional Practice

Credits: 45

In this Course, you will engage with the epistemological, theoretical, practical and ethical decisions and dilemmas that are part of designing any research study. You will consider these issues as you move from a researchable professional issue to a feasible and defensible research design.

Course 4: Analysing and impacting on Issues in Professional Practice

Credits: 45

This Course will support you in conducting the analysis of research data and ensuring that your research has some impact on professional practice, or on perceptions of professional practice, in your field. This Course has a dual focus, the first is on your capacity to make sense of and interpret research data. In doing so you will consider different ways in which data might be analysed in order to derive meaning and generate new knowledge. The second focus is designed to support you in ensuring that your doctoral research positively impacts in some way on the conduct or understanding of professional practice.

Stage 2

Doctoral Thesis Credits: 360

Your doctoral thesis is an individual piece of original research. You will conduct this under the supervision of a team of academic members of staff. The thesis will demonstrate your ability to undertake and complete coherent piece of research which would merit publication. The thesis will be approximately 50,000 words and will be examined as a written text and orally through a viva.