Teaching a PhD Course
Last week I offered my first full PhD course to doctoral students of Nord University. It was a 7.5 credit course on Qualitative Research Methods. I have been working on this course for about six months now. I co-taught this course with two Professors – Prof Helle Neergaard of Aarhus University and Prof Einar Rasmussen of Nord University. All three of us are qualitative researchers with papers published in top journals. Additionally, Helle Neergaard is a popular qualitative methods specialist with two published handbooks – one on methods and the second on techniques and analysis. The former inspired my taking to qualitative research during my PhD days.
Since the course was aimed at doctoral students in management and entrepreneurship, [image error]we sifted through the literature to find method articles and exemplars for the reading list. The final reading list included 13 articles – five method articles and eight exemplar articles. The course primarily focused on grounded theory, case studies (single and multiple), data analysis approaches (e.g. coding) and methodologies like the Gioia approach. The exemplar papers showcased how these methods and techniques were successfully used by scholars.
The course required students to submit a pre-course assignment of their dissertation or a paper project. The students had diverse research interests ranging from arts entrepreneurship education to continuous auditing implementation. It was a pleasure to see their motivations in exploring their respective phenomena of interest. We designed the course to build on student papers. The sessions included lectures, group discussions around exemplar articles and hands-on group work on their individual papers.
We went out for a nice social on one of the days. Ohma, a wonderful Asian/Sushi restaurant in Bodo, provided a nice ambiance to socialize and make new friends. We completed the course on a high note with the students capturing their learning and feedback. The students will now work on their post-course assignment and hopefully have working drafts of their papers soon.
It was a great experience teaching a PhD course. While distinctly different from graduate/post-graduate courses, it provided a great opportunity to reflect more deeply on research methods, especially qualitative. The questions from budding scholars helped refine my existing knowledge and triggered the search for new knowledge too. I came away as a more reflective qualitative scholar after teaching this course. I now look forward to teach my next PhD course. This is a different kind of fun.
