Faculty Best Practices to Support Students in the ‘Virtual Doctoral Land’

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Faculty best practices online doctoral students online higher education cohort-based model literature review

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