University of the Cumberlands EdD: Yeah, I enrolled

Discussion in 'Education, Teaching and related degrees' started by SteveFoerster, Jan 29, 2014.

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  1. Stanislav

    Stanislav Well-Known Member

    Not unprecedented. The president of Kyiv National University for Culture and Arts, Mykhailo Poplavsky, is famous for his singing career. He is awful at singing, dancing, and level of fitness, but has resources to produce albums, access to endless stream of extras for his music videos, and fills concert halls for his shows (in many cases, with students from his school). Funny guy, in a "what a disaster" sort of way (not for him, obviously - he is financially comfortable and famous, so it all works out for him).
     
  2. Priya Sharma

    Priya Sharma New Member

    Hi, Firstly I am new to this forum, its only when I was looking for PHD options I found this forum and really liked the way everyone is ready to share there experience and help.
    I have some questions regarding should I pursue Phd or not, id it right for me or not. I would really appreciate if i can get guidance so that I'll be out of this confused state of mind. My email id is: [email protected]. I would be really grateful from my heart if you could please shoot me an email and we can get in touch. Thanks a ton!
     
  3. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Stanislav's reference to me being in this program (in LittleShakespeare's ODU thread) reminded me that an update is long overdue. That, and we finally fixed the glitch that didn't let moderators update our sigs.

    Eventually I got to the dissertation phase and got bogged down. I started and stopped more than once, taking a few leaves of absence. I had a topic, I made some progress, I got through my lit review okay, but last year I realized I was bumping up against the overall time limit and I would have to reapply, be on the new catalog, the whole thing.

    Instead, I decided to transfer to the ABD completion program through Baker College. They took all my coursework, so no starting over. My topic straddles education and business, so it fit into their being a Doctor of Business Administration and I even end up academically qualified in another discipline. The cost wasn't a lot different. But what really tipped the balance was that at Baker College I could do the qualitative study I realized that I wanted to do. That's not impossible to do at Cumberlands, but it's strongly systemically discouraged. Rich referred to the developmental experience of writing a dissertation, and now I get what that means. So I finally have momentum again -- I have three chapters down, and my chair expects I can have my proposal approved by the end of the summer.

    I have no regrets. I would absolutely recommend Cumberlands to people who are starting fresh, or especially have less-than-ABD levels of transfer credit, and are interested (so far as they can know) in doing a quantitative study. I really enjoyed the coursework phase at Cumberlands and learned a lot. The people there are warm and welcoming, and as important contributors to my journey, Dr. Simpson and Dr. Vann are absolutely still going in my Acknowledgments section even though I'm finishing elsewhere. (Warren McDonald, who occasionally posts here, will too, as someone who was steadfastly encouraging at ATSU.) And I'm especially happy that my experience there encouraged Matt and others to have good experiences there.
     
  4. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Did you select the MIS concentration? If I remember correctly, you were in Cumberlands' IT program. If you did choose the DBA in MIS, that would be awesome. You could teach business administration and IS/IT. If you search for the DBA graduates on LinkedIn, you'll see that several of them have landed professorships at traditional, public universities. I've recommended this program to a few people.
     
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  5. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Nope. I do have a pretty strong technical background, but at Cumberlands I was in the Leadership program, which was really Educational Leadership. Either way, though, I don't actually foresee adjuncting anywhere.
     
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  6. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    Can you expand on this a little more? I'm really curious.
     
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  7. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    A dissertation consists of five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, results, and conclusions. The first three are assembled as a proposal, which needs to be approved, then data can be gathered.
     
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  8. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    Oops, I didn't snip my quote well enough. I meant the first part, the developmental experience. What do you feel like that has been like?
     
  9. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    It can have those 5 chapters, but it doesn't have to. This is especially true when qualitative methods are used, and even more so when theory is being created instead of being tested. Or when ethnographies or case studies are analyzed and presented (each sometimes taking a different chapter).

    Both of mine had 5 chapters. The first dissertation, a quantitative testing of a theory, followed the very standard path you described. But my Leicester thesis was a qualitative production of grounded theory. It still had 5 chapters, but the 4th described the phenomenon under study and the 5th constructed a theory around it. Very different.

    As you consider your qualitative methodologies (if you haven't already settled the question), be sure to structure your dissertation to fit your methods and findings, not a dogmatic structure. All through your dissertation advisor, of course, who just might tell me to shut up and have you follow the recipe! :cool:
     
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  10. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Very true, Rich! I'm not sure whether my chair would have pushed back against going somewhat afield had I been inclined, but she is pretty fond of saying that the best dissertation is a completed dissertation, and what I want to do fits the recipe, so I'm happy to stick with it.
     
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  11. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    Congratulations, Steve! Good luck in your remaining studies and research!
     
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  12. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    You complimented me on my comment about the dissertation being transformative. Well, that's only true if you complete it!

    If you can't get it right, get it wrote.
     
  13. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Oh, believe me, I'll be very happy to get this thing done. :D
     
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  14. cacoleman1983

    cacoleman1983 Well-Known Member

    I'll be glad to see you get it done as well. I need to start writing my literature review for my PhD in Education from Azteca/UCN. I've been enrolled for a year now.
     
  15. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    How much support do they provide through the process?
     
  16. cacoleman1983

    cacoleman1983 Well-Known Member

    It's kind of a do it yourself research type deal but I can reach out to one of the deans or other specialists for help. Generally with the price of the program, you get what you pay for. Someone gave me several samples of dissertations written by other students who had completed their PhD programs through Azteca, UCN, and a few other for-profit online universities. My intention is to use one of those as a guide for my dissertation. I have a rubric to go by as well so provided my work meets the requirements and is relatively as good as the other samples I have, I should be fine.
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2021
  17. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    I'm curious why you would do this. Your dissertation ought to take shape based on your research, not someone else's.

    In your literature review, you should be coming across many dissertations anyway as you establish your niche in your scholarly field. (Assuming yours is a regular PhD that would require it.)

    It doesn't hurt to get a feel for what might or might not be acceptable, but that's about as far as it goes.
     
  18. cacoleman1983

    cacoleman1983 Well-Known Member

    I probably should have said that I'm using the other dissertations as a template, not a guide. I have all of my references that I plan to use in the paper.
     
  19. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    I highly recommend two resources for learning how to write a dissertation. Both are dated, but so is the dissertation process itself--nothing's changed in a century. They are:

    How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation by David Sternberg
    Successful Dissertations and Theses by David Madsen

    Both are clear on process and structure.

    My recommendation:

    • Yes, learn about what this beast is all about.
    • Determine what you want your dissertation to produce.
      • Scholarly (contributing to theory) or professional (contributing to practice)
        • Scholarly: Theory creation or theory testing?
        • Professional: Creating new practice or testing existing practice?
    • Inductive or Deductive?
      • Inductive: producing results from the data gathered (i.e. grounded theory, case study, ethnographies, phenomenology); typically qualitative
      • Deductive: hypothesis testing, either quantitative or qualitative
        • Quantitative: descriptive and inferential statistics
          • Descriptive: what do the numbers tell us about the data we gathered?
          • Inferential: how do these sample data describe the population?
        • Qualitative: deep meaning from rich stories and other verbal data
    • Most importantly: how do you want this dissertation to inform your professional identity?
     
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  20. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    Guide or template. Makes no difference. I see nothing wrong with doing this. I used a few Liberty dissertations to guide mine. I am the first Ph.D. in CJ graduate at LU, so all the guides were from the School of Education. There was nothing content-wise that I could glean from their work. They merely helped with the organization/structure of the five chapers.
     
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