PhD Skills
This event took place on Monday 12 September 2005 at 10:00

Prof. Brigid Heywood PVC Research and Staff, The OU

PhD Skills is web-based scheme to support OU research students in developing the skills they will need to pursue and complete their doctorates successfully and on time. Crucially, it will enable us to fulfil our obligations under the revised QAA Code of Practice for PhD students in readiness for the QAA audit in December.

This year the scheme is in its pilot phase, and will be available to our new intake of full- and part-time students at their induction conference on 11th September. Supervisors play a crucial role in their students' skills development, and so the scheme has been designed to actively enable their participation - and to save them work by putting information at their fingertips.

The other key feature of the scheme is that it is designed to work at three different levels of specificity:

1. Generic;
2. Faculty/ Research Centre; and
3. Discipline/Department/Research Group

The briefing
This briefing is for staff such as Heads of Department, Associate Deans of Research and Directors of Graduate Studies. Its purposes are to:

• demonstrate the scheme, explain its functions and show how it links to the new arrangements for probation assessment for PhD students;
• show how the scheme can be customised at the three different levels of specificity, and enable work to start on this task (i.e. Faculties and Departments to tailor the information supplied to students to their specific needs and opportunities).
• prompt Faculties, Research Groups and Departments to begin informing, training and supporting their supervisors.

Click to download the PowerPoint slides