Saturday, November 15, 2008

Moving forward on the EdD in EDTECH


Great news--we've received permission to move forward with planning of our online EdD program in EDTECH! Our goal is to launch the program by fall 2010. I'm hesitant to announce it here, as we begin to get a lot of interested students wanting to know if they can take courses NOW that will apply THEN. Although I'd love to say yes, in reality, we can't count our chickens before they are hatched.

There are many levels of approval before a doctoral program launches. The program has to be reviewed within a university, and once that's done, it goes out for external review before being submitted to the State Board of Education for approval! The process can get bogged down or suspended at any point along the line, so from a student's perspective, it's not wise to take coursework now anticipating something that may not be there when they need it.

Now, having all the disclaimers out of the way, let me say I'm VERY excited to begin re-visioning our program. I say re-vision, because we actually outlined a doctoral program two years ago. A lot has changed in two years--we are a larger department, with more faculty, more courses, and a little more experience and understanding about where we want to head as a program. We've been encouraged to align our work to the Carnegie Foundation's Initiative on the Doctorate. Excellent! I'm looking forward to working with our team of faculty and staff to reflect on notions of excellence in doctoral education, especially as they apply to a program that likes to focus on emergent technologies for teaching and learning.

1 comment:

Cory Plough said...

Thats great news. When I first joined the EdTech program 16 months ago, I was hoping the EdD would be available by time I finished my MA. I understand it hit some roadblocks along the way, but great to hear you are back on track. It will be interesting to see what it looks like considering how much practical application the MA program has been, and how research based doctorate programs tend to be. I look forward to learning more as news develops.