Book review of "An Online Doctorate for Researching Professionals: Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An Online Doctorate for Researching Professionals describes the design, implementation and early evaluation of an online EdD in Educational Technology (EdD ETEC) at the University of Florida.The authors and their colleagues developed the program in response to the needs of working professionals whose aspirations for further education and applied research skills, combined with continuing full-time employment, were not met by traditional PhD programs in Education.Kumar and Dawson, faculty members in the program, recount the experiences of designers, instructors, evaluators and students from the program's inception through three cohorts of students enrolled (and 56 graduates) from 2008 to 2014.They offer, through their reflections and analysis, a model of an online terminal degree for those interested in developing rigorous, quality programs for researching professionals, in any discipline.Their book provides an evidence-based response to an emerging international trend: the growth of new professional doctorates.Divided into three parts, the book reflects the essential stages of program development: design, implementation and evaluation.Most chapters include examples of assignments, student research projects, student feedback and/or instructor reactions as evidence of success and lessons learned.A concluding section, Further Considerations, offers specific advice for academics considering the development of online professional doctoral programs.The book ends with a list of seminal references on distance and online education, program development, graduate education, learning theories, instructional philosophies, curriculum design principles, student support, quality frameworks, and educational evaluation.There are also scholarly articles by the University of Florida team detailing research results and other elements of the EdD ETEC program in the years before the publication of this book.Part I focuses on the Theoretical Foundations and Design of the online professional doctorate, and includes chapters on the context for and grounding of the degree, and on the design of the curriculum.Here, the authors describe the benefits of distance educa-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".