Preface and Acknowledgements

The model of an online professional doctorate that we present in this book is based on our experience with designing and implementing the online EdD degree in educational technology offered at the University of Florida. The journey began in 2006, when Kara and her colleague Rick Ferdig (now at Kent State University) began to recognize that our university’s PhD program in education did not meet the needs of all students. Like most PhD programs, ours was oriented toward students who aimed to work in an academic environment, teaching and conducting research, yet a significant number of our doctoral candidates had no interest in an academic career. Many were already working professionals whose goal was to apply their new knowledge in a particular context or, in some cases, simply to strengthen their credentials. These students typically attended school part-time, often commuting to campus after work, and took years to finish the program. We made accommodations for them as best we could, by adjusting course assignments to better meet their needs and by working out schedules that allowed them to pursue their degree on a part-time basis. Despite these accommodations, however, the PhD program was an awkward fit for them.

We had also begun receiving numerous inquiries from working professionals elsewhere in the country who were interested in earning a doctoral degree while maintaining their existing jobs. Although such an arrangement was clearly incompatible with our campus-based PhD program, it was not beyond our powers of imagination, given that Kara and Rick had recently launched our university’s first completely online MEd and EdS programs. Students applying to these programs tended to have a particular interest in educational technologies and in how these technologies could be used to support learning in the situations in which they were employed. We wondered whether we could design an online doctoral degree—one that would be as rigorous as, but different from, our campus-based PhD program—to serve the needs of students who planned to continue working in a professional context after graduation and whose interests lay in the field of educational technology.

At about the same time, a seminal article, “Reclaiming Education’s Doctorates: A Critique and a Proposal,” appeared in Educational Researcher, arguing that existing doctoral programs in education—whether the degree awarded was a PhD or an EdD—were failing on a number of fronts. The article’s authors, Lee Shulman, Chris Golde, Andrea Bueschel, and Kristen Garabedian (2006), made the case for a new type of degree, one that would integrate research and practice and would be explicitly designed to serve the needs of working professionals. They also pointed to the urgent need for such a degree. Inspired by the article, we shared our thoughts with our department chair, Tom Dana, who encouraged us to create a plan for an online EdD. Almost simultaneously, Kara was asked to serve on the university’s Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) committee. Launched in 2007, with the University of Florida as one of its founding members, CPED’s original mission was to reconceive and redesign the EdD degree as one specifically intended for professional practitioners, as distinct from a PhD in education. Although CPED informed our early thinking about professional doctorates, online programs were not a focus of CPED’s work at the time, nor was the field of educational technology, which has an unusually broad scope of application and draws students from a diverse array of backgrounds. Moreover, CPED was firmly oriented toward programs offered in the United States, whereas we became engaged in the work of incorporating what we had learned about the professional doctoral programs offered in England and Australia, where such programs had been in existence for decades. Ultimately, then, the model that we developed differed from CPED’s framework.

After much planning, we enrolled our first cohort of professional doctoral students in fall 2008. Ours was one of the first online EdD degrees in educational technology offered by a public research university in the United States and designed for researching professionals. The initial teaching faculty consisted of Cathy Cavanaugh, Erik Black, and Christopher Sessums, in addition to Kara and Rick Ferdig. Swapna joined us in fall 2009 and continues to serve as our EdD program coordinator and lead program researcher.

We would like to thank our families, the colleagues who worked with us on the University of Florida’s online EdD in educational technology, and the colleagues and PhD students who have collaborated on our research in the program. We are also grateful to the students in each cohort, who provided feedback on various aspects of the program; their comments allowed us to improve its quality, its relevance to student needs, and its eventual impact in educational environments. Finally, we extend our thanks to Jacki Donaldson, who edited several chapters of the first draft of this book.