Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Expanding Doctoral Education

An interesting theme from day two of the ANU Educational Research Conference at the Australian National University is the rapid expansion of postgraduate studies at university. One comment which got my attention was that the Australasian Digital Theses Program had "fallen over". From reading the web site, I had the impression that it had now been subsumed in various university based repositiories, which then had their metadata harvested by the National Library of Australia.

Also of interest is the question of what demand there is for postgraduate education, what it costs and what pool of people suitable for it is available. One issue is if there is too much concentration on the prestige of PHDs, when other more flexible forms of ongoing education would be more useful.

One example of a more flexible approach is the ANU Graduate Studies Select. The Postgraduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching I am currently studying allows for going to to a Masters.

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