Reflecting on Week 1 of the MOOC ‘Discovering Your PhD Potential: Writing a Research Proposal’ offered by the University of Leicester via FutureLearn, I have given a lot of thought to the challenges involved in obtaining a doctorate. Time and cost are obvious ones but I need to give some thought to the more fundamental challenge of what it is I want to research. Right now, I don’t know but would like it to be in the area of education, perhaps life long education and also something that incorporates sustainability. All very vague but I will stay close to the context of Sustainable Development Goal #4: QUALITY EDUCATION – “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. I’m sure that research in this area would have a positive contribution to society, I just haven’t found it yet.
The title of this week’s post is ‘Stepping Stones’ because my thinking is that my postgrad in Digital Education should be a stepping stone to finding a research topic suitable to pursue as a doctorate. If not, then I’ll find something suitable for the MSc in Digital Education and jump ship at that stage!
The discussions this week with other learners have been most informative and the best tip I’ve found so far has resulted in me creating a single spreadsheet to log all my research materials and filter by interest area, in my case Digital Education since my programme starts in a week’s time, but also Virtual Teams and Sustainability since these are my teaching focus areas. I’ve been using Evernote for a while and this year upgraded to Evernote Plus in order to access my notes across multiple devices. Combined with this spreadsheet as an index of sorts I think I now may have an efficient solution to capture notes, manage reviews of articles, store citations and lots more. For now, I’ll forego tools like Mendelay and EndNote until the need arises and ‘keep it simple’.
Now back to my spreadsheet, lots to log!
Sandra Flynn 