Submitting the Proposal

My ideas for my thesis crystallised over the sumer and autumn. In early November I attended the teaching week at IOE and talked through the outline proposal again with my supervisor. He agreed that it was viable and that it now needed to be formally submitted so that it could receive ethics clearance and approval from the research committee.

As I will explain my data collection is linked to a module running in February / March and requires a pre-course questionnaire to be issued in January. This placed an urgent time constraint (appropriate for this project!) and I spent 5 days working up the outline into a full proposal, complete with draft questionnaires, diary sheets and letters.

In order to complete the ethics statement I needed to demonstrate that the proposal had been scrutinised within the College as the data will focus on its students. I was also very keen to avoid problems resulting from lack of support within the College. Therefore before sending it through to IOE I submitted the draft to the College's Principal for her approval. This was especially beneficial as she has recently completed a PhD so understands the implications of research in the professional context. She made a number of suggestions for improvement in the draft. Following a detailed discussion the Principal gave her support for the research and forwarded a copy of the draft to the Chair of the College's Education and Research committee to keep the Trustees informed.

The thesis proposal was sent in on Wednesday 21st November. The following provides a brief summary:

Research Title:
Time and distance study in the post-industrial society

Research Aim:
To investigate the influence of work-life events on study time.
- The research will be conducted within the context of contemporary societal and workplace demands.
- The focus will be internationally dispersed vocational distance learning students studying with The College of Estate Management.

Research Objectives:
1. To examine Juler’s interactional network and verify its composition and structure within a 21st century international context;
2. To determine whether a relationship exists between the domains within a student’s life circumstances and the time they give to their studies;
3. To identify whether a boundary for the optimum weekly study time can be established;
4. To establish the viability of rule-of-thumb measures for quantifying study;
5. To establish whether different student age groups give time to online study activities differently.

Intended Outcome:
To offer conclusions as to whether study feasibility, as proposed within the Framework For Qualifications of the European Higher Education Area, can reasonably be evaluated.