Hello

my photo and hello


Hello and thank you for stopping by my blog. My name is Craig and I am always busy. I work full time in higher education working in research business and innovation, I'm a part-time doctoral student working on my doctor of education qualification, I have a 2-year-old son who is amazing plus I work as a copywriter for small businesses.

I have worked in higher education marketing and student recruitment for a number of years and as the landscape of marketing and recruitment changes rapidly I am fascinated with the marketization of the UK higher education sector and the challenges that this brings. More recently there has been a wave of interest in looking at students as consumers and how this focus is changing the learning landscape, the identities of students, academics and professional services staff at universities is really interesting.  Students don't seem to be attending university and accepting courses as they are designed and delivered, working towards meeting the set criteria required to pass their studies. These days, students are paying fees and they are demanding changes to the curriculum, teaching methods, and much more.

I am still fairly early on in my studies but I am interested in all of the above and somehow managing to narrow my focus and look at some of these areas in my research project and thesis.

My aim on this blog is to document my research and my experience in my studies and these posts may be peppered with some details of other major events in my life. I really do hope you enjoy reading and if you do, please comment and also share links with your friends and your networks.

Thanks

Craig
Location: Bristol, UK

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lecturing as a doctoral student

Image
  You may be aware that often, full-time PhD students are encouraged to teach on various programmes, predominantly to undergraduate students. This is an opportunity to both share aspects of their research and their point of view with others, as well as an opportunity to make some additional income on the side.  As a part-time EdD student, the same teaching opportunities don't appear to be as available. But as someone who is keen to build my academic experience as well as have an opportunity to talk about my research and share my thoughts, I wanted to have the option to deliver some sort of teaching.  I am lucky in that I have worked in Higher Education for a number of years, allowing me to build connections with numerous academics. Through these connections, I have openly talked about my interest in perhaps delivering guest lectures from an ethnographic perspective where I am able to bring theoretical concepts to life by using my own commercial work experiences as case st...
Read more

creative research methods

Image
When contemplating applying for a PhD I was pretty set on the fact that my research would have to be quantitive in terms of data-heavy, or qualitative where I only considered interviews as a source of data. Without being either of these, how could my research possibly contribute to existing knowledge and be of any value to both the academic and wider societies? Having been on my EdD course for almost two years I have been exposed to a wide range of methods for data collection and this has really inspired my thinking as I develop my own plans for my research. I am also in a lucky position to be working at a university where I interact with academics on a regular basis and I hear a lot about their research and the methods that they use in data collection and this, combined with my studies has really opened my eyes to vast opportunities available in conducting research. My most recent study-block on the EdD course introduced a number of methods for data collection and all of these methods...
Read more

Publicity Editor at Pubs and Publications

Image
As you may have gathered from the posts on here, I love learning the practical aspects of completing a doctorate successfully. I am interested in people and how they experience their PhD journey, the tools, tips and tricks that they employ to get them through each step of the process and succeed. One of the blogs I read to learn about other peoples aspects of PhD life is Pubs and Publications  and I find the posts there a real breath of fresh air. People write about their ups and downs of PhD life in a manner that feels therapeutic, humorous and that makes me want to read more of the posts. I reached out to them earlier this year and offered to contribute a guest post for them. I wasn't too sure if they would agree to my contribution and I was over the moon when they came back and said that they would love for me to write a post for them. So I wrote a post about how I juggle full-time work, part-time PhD, being a parent and all the rest of life and it was published early in May....
Read more