Distance Education for Doctoral Students: An Overview of the National Cluster Format for Students in the Doctoral Program for Child and Youth Studies.
This paper offers an oVerview of the telecommunications and delivery techniques involved in providing distance education to graduate students in doctoral programs. Good distance education should ensure variety of format and successful communication; it can come via audiobridge, videotapes, audiotapes, the tBlephone, electronic mail, electronic library access, electronic bulletin boards, and electronic classrooms. In the case of Nova Southeastern University (Florida), distance education graduate students in the so-called "National Cluster" are given several days of telecommunications training with particular focus on UNIX commands relevant to electronic mail and the Internet. A study of National Cluster students was begun there to identify degree of growth in their computer expertise, degree of computer use in pursuing their studies, and degree of effect technology use has had on career status and professio-,a1 or personal interactions. A copy of the survey is appended. (Author/BEW) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************
Faculty Best Practices to Support Students in the ‘Virtual Doctoral Land’
Online students face numerous challenges in successfully completing doctoral programmes. The aim of this article is to explore the best practices that can be employed by faculty to support students in achieving this. It also seeks to categorize and identify the best practices emerging from literature into themes. An exploratory research method was used involving a two-stage process, which had both broad and specific levels. Literature on online learning and doctoral education from the past 22 years (1993–2015) was reviewed. Eleven major journal databases were searched to identify articles for this review. In addition, a list of key journals that published studies on online doctoral pedagogies was also used to source relevant literature. This article reported five major themes that have emerged from the literature review, including the provision of timely and good-quality feedback, providing continuous support and promoting peer-to-peer facilitation, the pairing of new and experienced faculties, providing supportive mentoring to students and developing sensitivity to cultural issues, that could influence successful online doctoral study. This research is unique because there has not been any systematic review of literature that explores faculty best practices within a unified framework in an online doctoral programme context. A comprehensive understanding of existing literature can help establish important areas with regard to supporting the study of online doctoral students. Conclusion and directions of future research are also presented.
Content strategy in LibGuides: An exploratory study
Abstract Since its inception in 2007, Springshare's LibGuides has become a popular content management system (CMS) with academic libraries. The challenges of managing LibGuides content through a cohesive content strategy have not been well documented. The researchers conducted a survey of academic libraries that were using the LibGuides platform in Fall 2019 to determine how institutions are managing content challenges. Of 120 respondents, only 53% of the respondents indicated that their institutions had content guidelines that LibGuides authors were expected to follow. The top three most observed elements of these content guidelines were page design (80%), content reuse policies (77%), naming conventions (73%), and navigation (3%). 15% of respondents' institutions did not review guides once they were published. Of those that reviewed guides post-publication, authors (84%) most frequently reviewed their own guides. These findings imply that LibGuides are largely cared for on an honour system. Guidelines tend towards quantifiable elements and omit more abstract concepts.