Dear Chris, Ken, Kari-Hans, Dick, Michael and others,
Professional doctorates are taken fairly seriously in Australia. There is a regular biennial Professional Doctorates conference (most recent just before Xmas) and the Australian Research Council and other government bodies have put substantial funds into research aimed at gaining the maximum benfits from professional doctorates as an alternative to the PhD education program. I attended the last Australian Prof Doc conference and found the depth and breadth of analysis impressive. I suspect that the papers when published will be useful to those building professional doctorates in design-focused areas. At the conference was presented the findings of a major ARC funded research project into best practices and into gaining the maximum benefits from professional doctorates. The exec summary and full text of the research can be fouind at http://www.detya.gov.au/highered/eippubs/eip02_8/eip02_8.pdf The chapters on 'Doctoral education and Higher Education Policy ' and 'Doctoral education and the Knowledge Economy' were particularly interesting. The Australian government is taking professional doctorates very seriously. This was shown by the attendance at the conference and significant contribution of of Dr. Robyn Batterham (Australian Chief Scientist and adviser to the governemnt on research funding distribution) and of and Dr Carol Nichol ( Chair of the Higher Education Review Group, DEST). Issues that I found interesting were:
* The ways that the most sucessful forms of developing professional doctorates were strongly dependent on the type of professional institutions that are involved in defining professional practices
* The importance of the UK DENG (Professional doctorate in Engineering associated with the Engineering Council) as a a 'touchstone' exemplar of good practice for a wide range of discipline areas
* The interest of the Australian government representatives in devising a doctoral level qualification that is not research based and which in many cases will replace the PhD in a wide variety of disciplines.
I suspect its worth the design education community establishing and maintaining links with the broader professional doctorate communities.
Best wishes from sunny Perth
Terry
______________________
Dr. Terence Love
Love Design and Research
PO Box 226
Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel/Fax +61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
______________________
PS. An early working draft of my paper to the conference is at http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2002/2002%20DesignFocusProdDoctorates_TL.htm
|