Speed Up PhD Completion: a Case Study in Curriculum Changes

While the discipline has been changing at a furious pace of every 18 months, the average completion time for PhD in Information Technology remains stuck at 4-5 years. The long duration of the PhD program is a complex issue, since the underlying causes are multi-dimensional. There is no single silver bullet that would magically speed up the process. Capella first launched the PhD IT program in 2009. The basic structure is very similar to many traditional universities into 3 stages. In the first stage, students spend their time on course work that develops the skills and knowledge to prepare the student to do original research. In the second stage, students have to pass a comprehensive exam to demonstrate their readiness to do research. It is followed by a dissertation process, during which faculty mentors are assigned to supervise students in completing their PhD dissertation. In this paper, we describe Capella's efforts aiming at speeding up the degree completion for PhD IT by changing its curriculum over a 7 year period. When the program was first launched, the dissertation milestone schedule was based on the five chapter structure of the dissertation document. Often students found out that it was necessary to change the previous chapters when they worked on the issues in later chapters. The extra efforts were both frustrating to the student who had to make the changes and the faculty who had to review the revised chapters again. Not to mention that each iteration of these changes caused delays in the degree completion. To avoid these issues, the first phase of curriculum changes was implemented in 2010. The dissertation development is now broken into two stages: the preparation of a research proposal and the development of the full dissertation. Speed up is achieved by allowing rapid iteration of this lightweight proposal document to reduce uncertainties in the research design. Encouraged by the results of phase 1, we started to explore the possibility of start the dissertation earlier in their curriculum. In the second phase, preparation for the research proposal was moved up earlier to precede the comprehensive exam by allowing students to start working on research while still completing their course work. The development work of the research proposal is now decomposed into intermediate milestones and allocated to each of the residency courses. Each of the residency courses are judicially scheduled so that the students would have the just the knowledge and skills that they need to complete the individual parts of the research proposal. Residence courses for Capella consist of both an online portion and a face-to-face portion, thus providing a perfect setting for students to develop their research proposals under close faculty supervision. Although in theory, the students have the elements that they need for each of the residencies to develop their assigned intermediate milestones, they have found the process to be very challenging. To address this issue, in 2017 we have embarked on the third phase of the curriculum evolution: integrating research perspective into specialization courses. In the third phase, subject matter and research skills are integrated to provide students ample opportunities to hone their research skills before working on their own dissertation. When considered individually, each of these three phases of changes in the PhD IT curriculum represents only an incremental speed up of the PhD. When taken as a whole, these curriculum changes constitute a radical shift in how we perceive what the research process should be. The conceptual ideas that drive these changes may offer further opportunities for additional improvements in the future.