Piloting an Asynchronous ETD Pre-check. USETDA 2023.
Channel: USETDA
Date: 2023-10-12

Piloting an Asynchronous ETD Pre-check: Serving the Off-campus and the Time-poor. Kristin Terrill, Lily Compton and Thomas Elliott (Iowa State University Graduate College). Moderator: Teri Robinson.

Abstract. For some graduate students, the week or so after they defend their thesis or dissertation can be more stressful than the defense. Those who did not, or were not able to, attend formatting information seminars and boot camps, didn’t know about the available Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) templates, or are novices with digital editing technologies confront a major task of reformatting their long-form documents in the lead-up to graduation. Many are already out of state, working full-time at post-graduation jobs and may even be in a different hemisphere. To serve these students, the Center for Communication Excellence (CCE) piloted an asynchronous format check in the Fall of 2022. We used Canvas as our choice of learning management system to create a hub containing graduation resources, and we enrolled students who had filed for graduation, i.e., were in their final semester. Students could submit their PDFs as an “assignment” through Canvas, allowing them to receive format corrections before submitting to ProQuest for the official review. This pilot program complements the existing, synchronous ETD pre-check program at Iowa State University. It promises to mitigate bottlenecks in the ETD review process, which does not start until after the student completes all the other requirements of their program, including the thesis/dissertation defense. This existing workflow has led to a glut of ETD reviews in the last month of the semester, when delays in reviewing can be extremely stressful for graduate students, if not actually detrimental to their plans after graduation.

By shifting much of the formatting work to earlier in the semester, this asynchronous format check gives students more time to format their ETDs and reduces stress for the ETD reviewers. In this single session presentation, we summarize the process of planning and putting together the ETD resource hub on Canvas, demonstrate the process of submitting, pre-checking, and providing feedback to students, and discuss ongoing improvements. Attendees will get ideas for how to enhance outreach and provide individualized feedback to students with an ETD resource hub in a learning management system.

The authors work at the CCE, Graduate College for Iowa State University.

USETDA 2023 Conference. United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association.

https://www.usetda.org/