Strategizing Project Management in Academic Settings

Getting stuck is a project's worst enemy. Academic settings have a knack for producing the endless project that never comes to fruition. Research groups and design groups a particularly prone to this. Graduate students, and those setting out to do research in groups, can get bogged down and tripped up at dozens of spots in …

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The Shibboleths of PhD study

There is a point in the doctoral student experience where one ceases having ideas and begins having notions. This is a shibboleth. I’ve seen this discursive acquisition again and again, and I am beginning to feel that this shibboleth marks a significant change. While we might joke about having notions instead of ideas, hedging one’s …

Deconstructing the PhD Program of Study (POS) in Learning, Design & Technology

Craig and advanced Ph.D. candidate Khosi Lunga (mlunga@utk.edu) collaboratively wrote this blog post. Like many things in Ph.D. study, the Program of Study (POS) document is not as simple as it seems. It is not simply a list of courses a student must take to complete the degree. Rather, it’s a negotiated document that tracks …

Deliberate Design Decisions in Higher Ed Online Teaching

In an inter-university discussion group that was spawned, and is coordinated by, Jason McDonald at BYU, we recently grappled with the notion of design decisions made unconsciously. We came to understand this as options never considered. Through our discussion, graduate students and faculty from UTK, Purdue, Arizona State, and BYU, came to see unconscious design …

Quick Emergency Checklist for Synchronous Online Teaching

Written with John Kennedy, IT Online student and coordinator of UTK's Office of Student Media. This post was an emergency post for COVID-19 transition to online learning. It's kept as a tool for anyone making a sudden transition to synchronous learning. The 5-minute illustration to the right identifies the blog post. Illustrations don't need to …

How Research Groups Work

It’s a common misconception that Ph.D. study is about the courses you have to take. It’s not. It’s about the work that you do, but it’s hard to find the roads into that work early in one’s program. Sometimes courses help with that, sometimes they don’t. I have heard that Ph.D. programs in other countries …

A video-mediated observation

Teaching in the evening, it's often difficult to find a colleague to observe my teaching. Here I have video recorded a typical lesson in IT 521. This served a few different purposes. (1) A few learners were missing from the lesson and needed to watch it, and (2) I need a colleague to watch it …

Deficit Model versus the Bolster Perspective

There is this perspective in education called the deficit model, deficit view, deficit perspective, or some other combination of deficit and some visually oriented term. What learners cannot yet do, or where they fail. It appears in practitioner publications like Edutiopia as well as in scholarly journals. Essentially, the notion frames learners in terms of …

The Prospectus, Proposal, and the Dissertation

There is a lot of misinformation surrounding the prospectus, the proposal, and the dissertation. This may be so because this task is one left to advisement and mentorship rather than formal instruction. An open and critical discussion on the purposes of these documents rarely happens among scholars for good reason. The interpretation of these documents …

An Interview Protocol for Instructional Design Cases

We need more instructional design cases written by those who did not actually do the design, but where to start? I suggest interviewing the designer. Elizabeth Boling did the same in her case about the Alcatraz cell-house audio walking tour. I have done interviews twice now to begin design cases about designs I did not …