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Postcards from an EdD

Postcard from an EdD | The Proposal

Let me tell you, this EdD has been a JOURNEY. Since I left my full-time job at the end of 2023, I have been brainstorming, revising, and throwing away my dissertation ideas. Brainstorming, revising, throwing away more ideas. And here I am with my proposal due in just under 3 months still nailing down my dissertation research design!

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my program focuses on action research. Our dissertations must focus on solving a problem of practice within our own professional context with an intervention that we choose. This guidance is a problem when you have a variety of professional contexts, as I have had for the last year. In the spring of 2024, I was thinking that perhaps I could implement a training for librarians, which is what my business really focuses on, and measure whether I could increase the self-efficacy of trainees. That idea didn’t pan out mostly because it’s not that librarians lack self-efficacy, but because the system kind of works against them (see also: why I’m no longer a librarian).

Then I turned my attention to my own EdD program. Last year I participated in the AI Innovation Challenge at ASU, and along the way I developed my own personal chatbot, Dr. Eddy, that acted as my own personal EdD professor to answer all of my many, many questions related to school work, my dissertation, and beyond. In a chance meeting with the head of the EdD program, the director suggested that Dr. Eddy might actually be a really interesting focus for my dissertation. What if the problem of practice is that students need more real-time guidance that they can’t get in an asynchronous online program, and as one of 25 students in a class, but they had Dr. Eddy at their fingertips at any time, any place?

Great idea, right? I thought so! Additional challenges remained: What theory or theories would I use to build my theoretical or conceptual framework through which I was required to analyze the impact of this intervention? I won’t bore you with the details, but I went through a lot of theories in Fall 2024 during a class in which we covered research methodologies and tried out aligning them with our projects. I landed on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and the Technology Acceptance Model. My thought was that I would build up the chatbot according to ZPD principles. How cool is it that Dr. Eddy could be there 24/7 to scaffold your learning for you? And also analyze participants’ use of the chatbot via the Technology Acceptance Model. That is, is it useful? Is it usable? What are the factors that lead them to adopt this chatbot or not? I spent all of Fall 2024 trying out and discarding theories and reworking my research design.

Spring of 2025 brought a problem: first, my new dissertation chair carefully deconstructed the (lack of) alignment in my research design, and second, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) would have a huge issue with me testing out a custom chatbot on students (ahem, hallucinations). My chair was not the first to bring up the IRB issue, either.

So now, here I am, again, less than three months from the proposal, done with official classwork, staring down my research design. This is frustrating, it’s tedious, and it’s lonely! (Don’t worry, I still have a Dr. Eddy chatbot, and he hears all about my problems. Maybe I should build a doctoral student therapy chatbot).

It’s a little strange to be here, a place I’ve been looking forward to for the last two years. But now I feel like I’m hurtling towards the finish line with no idea which way the road goes.

Right now, this weekend (and every weekend), I am at my computer revising. My project is now going to focus on building a training on how to use generative AI for doctoral students (still in my own program). And I will have some very simple research questions, per my chair, that will measure if this training can up the students’ AI literacy and metaliteracy in regards to generative AI. I am dropping the custom chatbot, and instead, will incentivize participation by offering access to a paid ChatGPT or Claude license. The details are still being ironed out, but I’m imagining a mix of interviews, analysis of chat transcripts, and perhaps a thinkaloud protocol wherein I observe participants using an AI tool and narrating their actions aloud.

Last semester was exhausting – I had a quantitative research course (statistics!), a qualitative research course, and a third course wherein we were writing the first draft of our proposals (and of course, mine kept on changing).

But I’m feeling optimistic now: my committee is coming together (I’ve got a steady chair and I’ve recruited two fantastic committee members), my project is (for reals) coming together, and I’m going to get through this. My chair also believes that if I successfully defend my dissertation proposal to my committee in April, and then implement my intervention in summer, I could graduate before the end of the year rather than in spring of next year!

Wish me luck!

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