For over 20 years, Marian and Daniel have run the team delivering doctoral training for computing students at the Open University. The topics cover the entire doctoral journey. We are happy to offer the resources we have developed through this training for use by students and supervisors alike. If you do uses the sessions, please let the us know. All materials are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Our typical training session is 90 minutes long, with the community meeting for around 35 weeks in any given year. Each weekly session starts with attendees sharing “Happy News”, both professional (such as paper submission) and personal (such as a holiday trip). While this may appear to be a small aspect, it has a significant impact on the training environment, creating a closer relationship between the students.
For a similar reason, we have a very basic house rule – what happens in PGForum, stays in PGForum. This leads to their being no recording of sessions (without prior agreement for specific sessions). It is made clear to all students that there is no judgement on contributions, creating an environment for rigorous debate and occasional `non-official’ statements, but has to be a space for anyone to be able to say anything. This again binds the community together.
A .zip file of all of the resources is available for download here.
Welcome
- Welcome with the 10-100 word activity
- Welcome with activity to promote cross-disciplinary discussion
- Welcome with a discussion of work/life balance
- Welcome with open Q&A
Literature
Writing and arguing
- Making an argument
- Critical writing
- Thesis structure
- Abstracts and Limitations
- Crafting a narrative
- Rigor
Examination
Study Skills
- Project management
- Methods matrix
- Dealing with imposter syndrome
- Impact
- Case studies
- PDP
- Practical ethics
- Research admin
- Research Hygiene
Career Development
Publication
Other sessions
Other sessions we’ve run that don’t come with resources/presentations:
- Post-doc run: What I wish I’d known during my PhD
- Mock post-doc interview
- Student led session on recommended tools
- How to work a room/network
- Small number stats from the Department of Maths and Statistics
- Introduction to Latex and Overleaf
- Introduction to qualitative analysis
- Introduction to Nvivo
- Cross-disciplinary research
- The viva survivor – delivered by a student who has recently completed their viva
- Epistemology
- Teaching opportunities
- How to manage your supervisor
- Industry careers and CVs