Enhancing Doctoral Learning Through Knowledge Sharing
In August, 2009 I became a full time research faculty member for the School of Advanced Studies at University of Phoenix. This new position was created to help the University become better known as a place that not only has seven and innovative online doctoral programs, but also has faculty experts in the field of qualitative and quantitative research along with a host of research designs. Our faculty are “scholars, leaders and practitioners” and have extraordinary experience and expertise. As a University we want to better promote and integrate the work of our community of scholars and researchers into the larger body of knowledge and literature.
As scholars, leaders, and practitioners, our faculty’s knowledge isn’t solely restricted to academia. That is, our faculty members are largely part-time giving them the freedom to be actively engaged in their area of expertise. Specifically, University of Phoenix School of Advanced Studies faculty members are out in the real world building on the knowledge they learned in their own doctoral programs. They’re working as CEOs, entrepreneurs, K-12 superintendents, college administrators and leaders in business, industry, and healthcare and they’re bringing that combination of academic and practical experience to the online classroom. With their breadth of knowledge, our students are learning more than just theory and we want to tell the academic world about the success and accomplishments of learners collaborating with faculty to discover and build new research based-knowledge.
An important part of my position is to help our students find a sense of community that fosters the same passion for lifelong learning and scholarship that our faculty members share. To better serve our students and enhance our collaborative culture of knowledge sharing, we are refining an online database that highlights our faculty members’ areas of expertise and their published work. As a result, we hope to better serve and assist our learners in identifying a dissertation mentor and committee members for their doctoral dissertation.
Because mentors are instrumental in guiding our learners through the dissertation process, we are interested in optimizing the match and collaboration between doctoral learners and SAS associate faculty. Matching learners to faculty members who share their own research interests will empower learners to delve deeper into their research and produce a more robust dissertation. This in turn, will allow our learners to produce more high quality work that can be published in academic journals and presented at professional meetings and conferences.
Typically learners wait until they have completed their dissertation before they even consider publishing it. We’re networking with learners earlier in the process to identify their research interests and dissertation topics so that by the end of their first or second year learners feel confident enough with their research to pursue publishing or submitting proposals for presentations at conferences.
Increasing the number of academic journals that our learners are featured in and presenting at state and national conferences will raise external awareness of the University and help others to recognize that we are committed to building upon the transformational education that we first introduced more than 30 years ago. Innovation will always be at the heart of our success.
To learn more about the School of Advanced Studies Research Agenda contact Ron Hutkin at ron.hutkin@phoenix.edu.
