Category: Doctoral Training

Time is Marching On: A 4 Q 2021 Update

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While the original intent of this blog was to catalog the first years of my PhD Distance Learning Experience, I have returned now well into my penultimate year to provide a much-needed update. If not for any other reason, I needed a break from statistical analyses and am now prepared to take stock of what’s been accomplished during the last 18 months…

  • A little more than a year ago, and following my MPhil/PhD Upgrade, I accepted two posts at UCL including a PGTA to the Digital Media Masters Students Programme and a Content Developer for the EdD Education Programme. Both were incredibly gratifying and I was able to contribute, particularly leveraging my previously honed at-distance skills that came in handy when helping others migrate to new ways of learning and instruction online. After all, no one knew in 2018 of the coming pandemic.
  • Both PGTA and CD roles enabled me to pursue and receive Associate Fellowship in the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA, Advanced HE) from February, 2021.  Since that time, I’ve been fortunate to be welcomed as a Full Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and an Impact Fellow at UCL’s Institute of Healthcare Engineering (IHE).
  • On the research front, I’ve completed the design, pilot, production and data collection for the SensorAble project. I am “well down the road” regarding data analysis and have started to author my materials, including both the Methods and Results section for both my Dissertation and Journal Articles. I’ve also presented my findings at both UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience Development Diversity Lab and at the University of Cambridge Cognition Education and Emotion Lab.
  • I am motivated to begin helping shape Public Policy by contributing on both sides of the Atlantic. This includes building upon my recent appointment as Chairperson for the Center for Autistic and Related Disabilities (CARD) at Florida Atlantic University, and in authoring forthcoming POSTNotes on invisible disabilities to Parliament. I’ll be making applications for various grants (small pots of money!) to help contribute to shining a light on neurodiversity issues relating to sensory, attention and anxiety at both HEI, employment and social venues.
  • Last summer, I began shifting my focus from doctoral training to cognitive and human computer interaction (HCI) knowledge building. The latter is now begin to catch up to the former as my research was decidedly less technologically oriented in the earlier phases. I am now happily exploring Open Learner Models, artificial intelligence, machine learning, multimodal learning analytics, etc.
  • As I look to publish my first journal article, I have participated in numerous conferences and continue to increase my communication and dissemination skills. Four OSF Pre-prints are now registered and available on GoogleScholar, ResearchGate, UCL Explore, and elsewhere.  I even managed to complete a peer review for an  article on behalf of my supervisor Sarah White, and also assisted my other supervisor Joni Holmes in editing her journal article.

There’s much more planned for the remainder of the next phase of my journey (i.e., the upcoming 18 months prior to defending my dissertation). It is my fervent hope that I will include these benchmarks in coming posts. For now…stay safe, healthy and enjoy the holidays!

And so it begins

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A brief backgrounder:

I enrolled at UCL as a full-time distance learning student in June 2019. As a U.S.-based entrepreneur since 1993, and a family man (with a magnificent, special needs teenager and brilliant wife of 25 years), UCL’s Post Graduate Research Program appeared as the best solution to help make transformative research and contributions to what I perceived to be an underserved and deserving segment of our society.

Today is a typical weekend day, packed with a variety of meaningful and motivating scholastic work. I started quite early (5.a.m.) by placing the finishing touches on my first draft of an MPhil/Upgrade Report (due four months from now). Having uploaded this to my brilliant supervisors (Prof Kaśka Porayska-Pomsta and Dr Sarah White), they will now have the opportunity to iterate the content by (re-)considering all that we have learned through my pursuits up to this point.

Later this same morning, I refocussed my efforts on the few remaining Doctoral Research Training modules I have left in my “requirements bin”. My final three subjects include Qualitative Analysis, Research Methods and IMPCorC. As today is an induction week for new students, the reading load is uncharacteristically light; however, Dr Sveta Mayer (who is the Programme Leader for Online MPhil/PhD) firmly believes in establishing and maintaining esprit de corps among the cohort of both returning and newly minted PhD students. Hence, I will spend a good deal of time “online” today reinvigorating my responsive efforts to supply answers to questions about my research, how mixed methodologies and theories affect my proposed study, etc. Then, I shall “turn the tables” and enquire about new student’s research and provide an encouraging soliloquy of life as a distance-learning researcher. “It’s the best thing I have taken on next to my marriage and birth of our daughter!”

After a quick email reminder to both supervisors about looming Ethics Application Deadlines, I spend the majority of the afternoon authoring an upcoming presentation I am to make at the Development Diversity Lab (within UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) in two weeks’ time. This will be my second presentation which is streamed live to my secondary supervisor and attending students/participants at Alexandra House (on Queens Square, just a short walk from the Knowledge Lab). As a “mature” student who completed computer and electrical engineering undergraduate degrees in the mid 1980s, it amazes me that I can work in Florida—some 7,500 kilometers away from London—and confer in real-time what knowledge, experiences and camaraderie ensues with my fellow laboratory mates.

If only I could partake of the complimentary tea and treats provided….

As the evening approaches, I map out specific readings related to my ever-mounting literature research. Combined with a few extracurricular modules on neural network training (MATLAB Onramps, etc.), I dive in after a nice dinner with my family. If I have the strength, I’ll start porting my lab presentation outline to a PowerPoint Template; but something tells me I may be out of coffee…so a quick run to the market may prove useful for a morning re-start.