Improving professional IT doctorate completion rates

Abstract

Professional doctorates in Information Technology (IT) have been a relatively recent phenomenon, giving IT professionals career management choices not previously available to them. However, successful completion rates are the lowest of all disciplines. Completed doctorates rate in quality equivalent to PhDs, and retention has been identified as a major obstacle to completion. This qualitative study, involving 44 semi-structured interviews with students, supervisors and institutional support personnel, investigated the obstacles. Amongst the strategies discovered to improve completion rates were retention, student engagement with supervisors, feedback on progress, student engagement in the course, and student involvement in institutional communities of practice.

Inside the Minds of Doctoral Students: Investigating Challenges in Theory and Practice

“…The multidisciplinary nature of the IS discipline has often facilitated its classification under science doctorates (Burmeister, 2015), which may have brought about a poor representation of IS doctorates in the literature (Hirschheim & Klein, 2012). Added to the dearth of resources for potential doctoral candidates in the IS discipline to leverage upon, is the evidence of its worst completion rates in Australia (Burmeister, 2015).…”

“…Added to the dearth of resources for potential doctoral candidates in the IS discipline to leverage upon, is the evidence of its worst completion rates in Australia (Burmeister, 2015). In an attempt to address this issue, we draw on Kiley (2009), who argues for the concept of zone of proximal development as an approach through which a guide is provided by someone who has already engaged in that learning and is prepared to assist a fellow learner or a potential learner.…”

The Conduct of a Review

“…As mentioned above, desk rejections are when an editorial decision is made that an article is not suited to the journal. The second scholarship paper (Burmeister, 2015) had that experience. It had previously been submitted to a journal ranked A* in ABDC, but received a desk rejection.…”

“…Of the five articles he has published in AJIS (Bowern, Burmeister, Gotterbarn, & Weckert, 2006;Burmeister, 1995Burmeister, , 2015Burmeister, Islam, Dayhew, & Crichton, 2015;Simpson, Nevile, & Burmeister, 2003), only the two on scholarship are solo authored. So as not to embarrass co-authors, only the reviews of those two articles are detailed here; those two articles span almost the entire history of AJIS.…”

“…Returning to Burmeister (2015), it underwent two rounds of review. The first involved three reviewers and resulted in a 'Resubmit for review' now called a 'Revise and resubmit' decision.…”