About the project
Funded by the British Council’s UK-China-BRI Countries Education Partnership Initiative, the Digital Doctorate Training Hub (Digi-Doc) three-and-a-half-year project brings together an international Higher Education partnership across four countries: the UK, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
The Digi-Doc project will establish a doctoral training hub to support development of a high-quality ‘digital doctorate’, the EdD-I, to meet the needs of an international community of educational professionals looking to extend their knowledge and skills and improve practice in ways that positively impact learners and communities.
BCU has pioneered an innovative ‘close to practice’ professional doctorate programme in Education, the EdD, and the UK’s first accredited doctoral supervision programme. The Digi-Doc project will focus on transferring this work to new contexts.
Why Digi-Doc?
The British Education Research Association (BERA) has noted the importance of building research capacity amongst teachers as a key dimension of a self-improving education system (BERA, 2014) and the UK Universities Council for the Education of Teachers has noted the benefits of teachers’ engagement with research. However, traditional research degree pathways are not always accessible or inviting for teachers looking for applied, flexible research opportunities that complement the ‘day job’ and provide opportunities to build networks with other practitioner-researchers grappling with similar challenges and dilemmas.
The Digi-Doc project will address this problem by providing a more accessible and inclusive route to doctoral qualification. Digi-Doc will digitise BCU’s innovative and highly successful EdD to provide an international programme tailored to the needs of busy education professionals in China, Indonesia and Vietnam. The international version of the EdD, the EdD-I, will combine online teaching from BCU with peer-to-peer support and local supervision. The project will develop a bespoke supervisor training in parallel, benchmarked to a UK award. The Digi-Doc hub will be a cost effective, sustainable solution to the upskilling of teachers, particularly women teachers for whom caring responsibilities may be a barrier to studying for an international/UK doctorate.