workforce campusreview. com. au
Technology can save the PhD
Current support systems for graduate students are outdated and inadequate; it’ s past time for an update that brings the whole process together for doctoral candidates.
Linda Glassop interviewed by Antonia Maiolo
A lack of good technology and support infrastructure is partly to blame for the 25 per cent dropout rate amongst PhD students, an expert says. Dr Linda Glassop, founder and chief executive of ComWriter, has been involved in higher education for 14 years, teaching at seven Australian universities. She says today’ s PhD students need access to up-to-date technology, rather than programs designed decades ago.
“[ At the moment ], there are not a lot of tools available to help [ students ], it’ s still very much a pen-and-paper environment, which is unfortunate,” Glassop says.
Glassop, whose company has developed a platform to help make academic writing easy for PhD students, spoke with Campus Review about how doctoral candidates can better use their time by incorporating technology into their research process.
CR: What does the data say in regards to the extent to which PhD students integrate certain technologies into their research practice?
LG: Students vary because they are from different disciplines. An engineering student might use something completely different to a commerce student or an arts student.
What we do know is that in the last 29 years, numbers of research personnel in Australia have more than doubled, from 40,000 to 90,000. Unfortunately, most of those are destined to stay in academic work, as opposed to moving into industry. In Australia, about
30 per cent of PhD students move into industry, whereas in the US it’ s closer to 75 per cent.
The education sector is [ experiencing ] heavy competition, so technology needs to be integrated into any role, whether you are staying in education or moving into industry. Higher education has evolved – with online teaching, online publishing and mobile students – but research work has stayed still from a technology perspective. With a 25 per cent drop out rate, there is a lot of pressure to ensure research students successfully complete their degrees. So we need to focus on tools to support the process, rather than on monitoring mechanisms. There are not a lot of tools available to help research students; it’ s still a pen-and-paper environment, which is unfortunate. We don’ t have good technology and a good support infrastructure in place to help these students through the process.
There has been a lot of energy focusing on making sure undergraduates complete their degree. For a graduate student, it’ s a long journey on a single project, often seen as something you do on your own as opposed to in a team or group. So it can be a lonely existence and this creates a lot of problems.
Just completing the PhD and understanding the whole process is quite difficult. We are old-fashioned, I think, with our training and the technology that supports PhD students. We run little workshops for them and training sessions and things like that, but we’ re not sophisticated with our support infrastructure.
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