Capstone Experience

I would like to acknowledge Paula Kramer for her persevering mentorship and her generous, indefatigable contribution to the scholarship of the profession. And to Guy McCormack, my first and most enduring teacher in the profession of occupational therapy.

This paper reports on the implementation and management of an Information Systems Practicum used in a graduate Computer Information Technology program. The Information Systems Practicum provides a student with an 8 month learning experience that is academically rigorous, intellectually challenging, and which serves as a culminating experience to the student's coursework. Specifically designed around an action research methodology, the Information Systems Practicum engages the student as a practitioner and provides real work opportunity congruent with the course of study. Implementation and management strategies, as well as the educational and philosophical foundations of the Practicum, are investigated along with providing conclusions about the program drawn over a 4 year period of time.

Abstract: Developing real-world enterprise systems requires the integration of a number of complex technologies. The 2006 Model Curriculum for Graduate Degree Programs in Information Systems recognizes this need and recommends an integrated capstone experience directed toward helping the graduate student amalgamate the broad knowledge base required for successful development of enterprise systems. Conveying a practical knowledge of client-server systems development to computer and information systems ...

I would like to acknowledge Paula Kramer for her persevering mentorship and her generous, indefatigable contribution to the scholarship of the profession. And to Guy McCormack, my first and most enduring teacher in the profession of occupational therapy.

Abstract: Developing real-world enterprise systems requires the integration of a number of complex technologies. The 2006 Model Curriculum for Graduate Degree Programs in Information Systems recognizes this need and recommends an integrated capstone experience directed toward helping the graduate student amalgamate the broad knowledge base required for successful development of enterprise systems. Conveying a practical knowledge of client-server systems development to computer and information systems ...

This article describes the outcomes of an e-mentoring scheme used as a functional component within an online graduate course in human resource development. During the online course, individual students engaged in independent field projects, drawing upon advice and guidance from distanced practitioners who served as e-mentors. E-mentors were paired with students to guide the success of the individual field projects. As part of the design of the online course, an evaluation was carried out to assess the experience of the e-mentors, with a focus on perceived benefits and challenges of the e-mentors. Presented is a brief overview of the ementoring scheme, the e-mentoring assessment methodology, and the reported outcomes of the ementoring experience by the e-mentors.

There is currently much debate on the adequacy of Information Systems courses in preparing students for systems development work. To address this need, this paper’s purpose was to determine whether the skills that students learnt during a systems development course were applied in the workplace. The investigation was performed during 2004 from students who had attended the third year systems development course at the University of Cape Town during 2000 to 2003. This course has as its outcomes various technical, interpersonal and business skills. The research approach adopted was to determine graduate’s usage and importance rating of these skills in the workplace, satisfaction of industry representatives with student skills as well as the extent to which graduates felt these skills had been learnt during the systems development course. Quantitative analysis of questionnaires completed by graduates and evaluation forms completed by industry representatives was performed. The results c...

The education doctorate (Ed.D.) is almost 100 years old. Yet, since its inception at Harvard University in 1920, the Ed.D. has suffered an identity crisis. Often labeled as the 'lesser' doctoral degree in education, the Ed.D. has for decades been at the center of debates for and against a professional school of education, the unification of education with arts and sciences, and the autonomy of schools of education (Osguthorpe & Wong, 1993). Yet this periodic concentrated discussion about the purpose and goals of the Ed.D. has done little to explain what this degree is or can become. In this chapter, I look to the beginning of doctoral study in education and trace the 80year discussion of the distinctions between the Ed.D. and the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) as a means to understand the roots of confusion and labels that have been applied to the education doctorate. As the end of the chapter considers, the Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED) has assumed the charge for reclaiming the education doctorate (Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006). Professional Education in the United States In 1857, teacher, lecturer, writer, and editor William Russell (1798-1873) proposed that teachers should be given control over entry into their profession. Russell wrote, "Let a teachers' association receive a charter from the State and proceed, without further authorization, to examine and pass upon applicants for membership" (in Bradley, 1999, p. 38). That same year the National Education Association (NEA) was founded as a professional association for teachers in Cincinnati , and William Russell closed its first annual convention with discussion of his notion

Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers is an excellent resource for Ed.D. program faculty and administrators who are committed to developing scholarly practitioners. Doctoral students will benefit from having this book as required reading in their initial research course as it describes the value of scholarship and the significant impact various forms of public scholarship can make in terms of social justice and equity. Kezar et al. (2018) promote activism by sharing numerous examples of public scholarship, including their own, and outlining several paths for how researchers can engage in public scholarship to impact policy and practice in higher education. This book is organized into three main sections. In the first section, the authors describe the context for public scholarship. In the second section, approaches to public scholarship are shared and in the third section, the focus is on encouraging and learning public scholarship.

Since its inception nine years ago, CPED members have re-envisioned and implemented a new purpose for the professional practice doctorate in education, or Ed.D. This new purpose is grounded in the goal of preparing doctoral students to serve as scholarly practitioners, those who engage community as stakeholders in the process of improving problems of practice. Forming practitioners to be leaders in their communities under the CPED framework requires faculty who look beyond traditional roles by embEd.D.ing themselves in communities to work alongside practitioners working to transform their communities. Unfortunately, at many institutions, community-engagement is considered counter-normative to the traditional interpretation of research, teaching, and service, though it need not be. This paper will discuss the implications of CPED's community-engagement principle for Ed.D. programs, institutional policies, and academic environments in which community-engaged faculty do their work ...

The design process that resulted in the creation of the education doctorate (Ed.D.) program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) integrated the perspectives of critical friends from the outset. Even after the decision was taken to add a terminal degree in leadership

Over the past fifteen years, new types of " professional practice " doctorates have emerged in a number of professions that had never had doctoral degrees before, not only in the U.S. but also in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere (Zusman, 2013). Professional practice doctorates now stand firmly as an appropriate and relevant qualification for enabling individuals to develop their research skills and particularly for advancing their profession and their professional practice (UK Council for Graduate Education, 2015; Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006). However, the proliferation of programs has given rise to a number of concerns related to program design, curriculum development, pedagogy, professional impact and quality assurance and has lead to a growing and active lively international community dialogue focused on the sharing of best practice for professional doctorate program design, rigor, and supervision. The idea of community emphasizes intersubjectivley shared knowledge and values, which symbolic-interpretists call communities of practice and language communities (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2006). This paper explores how shared understandings of organizational realities are constructed and maintained through the interactions of organizational membership. The author identifies and applies a framework to the structure, and development of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate, commonly known as CPED, a knowledge forum on the education doctorate (EdD). The paper explores the emerging organization's structure over the last eight years and shows how consortium members by meeting together biannually at two/three day convenings have developed a professional practice doctoral program framework that is flexible and fluid enough to be adapted to different institutions' needs, and contexts. This scaffolding permits school of education faculty and administrators to consider how to move beyond distinguishing the EdD from the PhD and to concentrate more appropriately on the needs of professional practice preparation in education. Lave and Wenger (1991) first proposed the idea of organizations as a community of practice to explain how learning occurs through social interaction. They defined a community of practice as a group of people informally bound together by common interests and shared repertoires (routines and vocabulary) with the goal of mutual learning and the development of knowledge. In this paper the author shows how the CPED community acting as critical friends share and broker knowledge. Additionally, using the concept of language communities the paper explores how the CPED consortium crafted specific vocabulary, and discourse. (For current list of participating institutions, see the CPED website at http://www.cpedinitiative.org). In outlining the growth of CPED, Greiner's lifecycle stages of organizational development (1972) are applied. Greiner identified five developmental stages in an organization's lifecycle: entrepreneurial, collectivity, delegation, formalization, and collaboration (see Figure 1). Each stage is dominated by a different focus and often ends with a crisis that requires an adaptive change for organizational survival. Such a crisis may actually be lethargy due to burn out associated with dual roles, and continuous need for innovation rather than action. According to Greiner each stage crisis of renewal will lead to an outcome of organizational growth or decline. In the case of CPED, the proactive nature of the project's leadership has to date resulted in effective management strategies due to successfully adapting to the various phases in its growth and lifecycle.

This dissertation explored the state of acceptance of new media projects as Ed.D. capstone experiences and the rationale for the acceptance, rejection, or undecided participants’ positions on this subject. Many authors argue that a traditional dissertation, because of its form and reachability, does not fit the heterogeneous nature of the educational field. New media, which can take many forms, is a 21st century affordance that already permeates the everyday lives of graduate students. Consequently, the theoretical frameworks that guided this dissertation were: (1) multimodal literacy theory, which argues that technological progress has affected the way people communicate and that addresses the multimodalities that are required to teach and learn in the 21st century; and (2) connected learning, which supports the use of new media to foster environments for meaningful experiences and for growth. Participants in this study were members of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), and are thoughtfully engaged in the dialogue about the improvement of their Ed.D. capstone experiences. For this multiple-case qualitative case study, 58 questionnaires were given, 32 responses were collected followed by relevant document review and 15 semi-structured phone interviews. The findings indicate that new media projects are still often rejected as Ed.D. capstone experiences because of faculty unfamiliarity with what new media is, government sanctions, and because in the participant’s views a traditional dissertation means research study. This study also indicates that rigor is the crucial factor in determining the acceptance or rejection of new media projects as Ed.D. capstone experiences. Recommendations include educating faculty about new media and its potential benefits for educational research dissemination, conducting research on the construct of rigor as it relates to graduate capstone experiences, and exploring how nontraditional formats of capstone experiences are developed and supported by dissertation mentors and committees.