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This paper aims to expand the theory of situated learning with the application of technology and provides a technology-based situated learning model with suggestions for doctoral program design.

A literature review of the relevant topics was conducted. Themes emerged by the systematic review of the relevant studies and theoretical framework.

Studies reveal that part-time doctoral students often feel unsupported, dissatisfied and disconnected with their program. Many of these issues may be mitigated by faculty and peer mentoring, and various forms of asynchronous communication through a situated learning framework with interactive communication technologies.

Research of doctoral education should pay more attention to part-time doctoral students and investigate the quality of their programs given their individual needs, and how their progression and completion can be achieved through the innovative approaches proposed in this study.

Program designers may use a technology-based situated learning approach in program design to fulfill part-time doctoral students’ needs toward enhancing mentorship, students’ academic self-efficacy and career preparation. Further support is offered through a virtual community of practice.

This paper draws researchers’ attention to program design and part-time doctoral students’ retention and completion of a doctoral program.

This study provides an innovative synergetic model that helps administrators and program designers to design doctoral programs and motivates researchers to conduct research regarding part-time doctoral students.

This article is intended to contribute towards furthering the understanding of researcher development as demonstrated by doctoral students' learning within scholarly communities. The article does this by reporting the findings of a study that explored the students' key learning experiences during their doctoral journey.

The 19 participants were natural science doctoral students from a top‐level research community in Finland. The data were collected through interviews that were qualitatively content analysed.

The participants emphasised the significance of participation, development as a scholar, developing specific research competences as well as learning to balance between doctoral research and other institutional tasks. They situated the key learning experiences in collaborative academic contexts such as research activities, taking courses, and academic meetings. The participants generally perceived their experiences as positive and enhancing.

Significant learning experiences identified by natural science doctoral students themselves are rarely studied. The results of the study reported in this article may be used by doctoral trainers, supervisors and students to create environments that foster students' learning and researcher development through their participation in scholarly communities.

This study aims to explore the disciplinary characteristics of doctoral students’ generic skills learning experience at a Finnish university.

An online survey measuring doctoral students’ generic skills learning experience was administered to all doctoral students of the university and 1,184 responses were obtained. The study conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, principal component analysis and heatmap analyses.

The results suggested three major trends. First, students’ scores for research integrity skills were consistently lower in the hard sciences, such as biological and environmental sciences, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, science and medicine. Second, students of the law showed a unique trend; their scores for research integrity, leadership and entrepreneurship skills learning were remarkably higher than those in other faculties, but they had the lowest scores for communication skills.

The data represented students at one Finnish university, so institutional and geographical differences fell beyond the scope of this paper. Furthermore, the results could reflect either the authentic levels of students’ acquired skillsets or self-interpretation of experiences governed by their disciplinary values. Accordingly, the immediate generalisability of the findings to individuals and different contexts should carefully be considered.

The findings can contribute to improve doctoral training practices. In addition, the survey results are useful for the further development of inventories, as doctoral students’ engagement in generic skills development has been attracting attention in higher education.

Concerning trends in graduate education, such as high attrition and underdeveloped skills, drive toward a new doctoral education approach. This paper aims to describe and propose a transformative doctoral education model (TDEM), incorporating elements that potentially address these challenges and expand the current practice. The model envisions discipline-specific knowledge coupled with a broader interdisciplinary perspective and addresses the transferable skills necessary to successfully navigate an ever-changing workforce and global landscape. The overarching goal of TDEM is to transform the doctoral student into a multi-dimensional and adaptive scholar, so the students of today can effectively and meaningfully solve the problems of tomorrow.

The foundation of TDEM is transformative learning theory, supporting the notion learner transformation occurs throughout the doctoral educational experience.

Current global doctoral education models and literature were reviewed. These findings informed the new TDEM.

Designed as a customizable framework for learner-centered doctoral education, TDEM promotes a mentor network on and off-campus, interdisciplinarity and agile career scope preparedness.

Within the TDEM framework, doctoral students develop valuable knowledge and transferable skills. These developments increase doctoral student career adaptability and preparedness, as well as enables graduates to appropriately respond to global and societal complex problems.

This proposed doctoral education framework was formulated through a review of the literature and experiences with curricular design and pedagogical practices at a research-intensive university’s teaching and learning center. TDEM answers the call to develop frameworks that address issues in doctoral education and present a flexible and more personalized training. TDEM encourages doctoral student transformation into adaptive, forward-thinking scholars and thriving in an ever-changing workforce.

This paper aims to present a thematic analysis investigating the experiences and reflections of doctoral students in social work at a Canadian university who were mentored in the development of teaching expertise, including course design, delivery and evaluation, by a senior faculty member. Recommendations to others who are considering engaging in doctoral student teaching mentorship are presented.

The paper examines the authors’ reflections on their experiences of doctoral student mentorship through their involvement in collaboratively designing, teaching and evaluating an online undergraduate course. The inquiry used a qualitative approach grounded in Schon’s concept of reflexive learning.

Based on the results of the thematic analysis of the mentees’ reflections, this paper presents the collaborative teaching mentorship model and discusses how receiving mentorship in teaching facilitated the mentees’ development as social work educators.

Although quality guidelines in social work education recommend that doctoral students should be adequately prepared for future teaching opportunities, there is limited discussion about doctoral student development as educators within the academic literature, especially from the perspective of doctoral students. There is also limited articulation of specific models of doctoral student mentorship in developing teaching expertise. The authors hope that sharing their reflections on their experiences and describing the collaborative teaching mentorship model will serve to deepen understandings and promote further exploration and development of doctoral student mentorship in teaching.

This paper compares the learning experiences of full‐time PhD students in 28 Education Departments and 31 Chemistry Departments in British universities. A questionnaire composed of two major dimensions of the learning experiences, supervision and research environment for doctoral students, was distributed to about 2,200 students. It is found that Chemistry departments are seen as offering better doctoral education as perceived by students than Education departments on most counts, especially regarding academic culture of facilitation, intercultural facilitation of research for foreign students and research facilities in research environment for doctoral students. Supervision is perceived to be more satisfactory in Chemistry than in Education especially in aspects of supervisor’s knowledge, supervisor’s research workload, supervisor’s student‐load and supervisor’s helpfulness in finding funding. A theoretical framework of the Teamwork and Individualist research training structures to discuss the possible causes of these findings is offered. It is proposed that disciplinary diversity in effectiveness of doctoral education is engendered by the two distinct research training structures.

The purpose of this paper is to present considerations for developing a writing community for doctoral students.

The paper reflects on data from a self-study of a writing seminar in which the authors were involved. The authors examined students’ writing samples and peer-review comments, email correspondence, online discussion board postings, meeting minutes and participants’ reflections on their participation in the seminar.

While doctoral students described benefits from their participation in the writing seminar, the paper provides a cautionary tale concerning the challenges that can arise in the development and delivery of interventions that focus on developing writing communities involving doctoral students.

This article draws on findings from an examination of a writing intervention to consider potential challenges that faculty and students face in developing writing communities. Findings may not apply to other kinds of settings, and they are limited by the small number of participants involved.

The paper discusses strategies that might be used to inform faculty in the development of writing communities for doctoral students.

The authors’ experiences in developing and delivering a writing seminar highlight the importance of the process of trust-building for students to perceive the value of feedback from others so that they can respond to the technical demands of doctoral writing.

There is a growing body of work on the value of writing interventions for doctoral students such as retreats and writing groups. These are frequently facilitated by faculty whose area of expertise is in teaching writing. This paper contributes understanding to what is needed for faculty who are not writing instructors to facilitate groups of this sort. Participants must demonstrate a sufficient level of competence as writers to review others’ work; develop trusting, collegial relationships with one another; and be willing to contribute to others’ development and make a commitment to accomplishing the required tasks.

This paper aims to outline a participative approach to researching education doctoral students' trajectories that functions both as a form of training in research methodology and as a means of reflection on the doctoral trajectory and what doctoral students have brought to the doctoral process through their experience.

Ten participants formed dyads and acted as both researchers and subjects of research, using narrative accounts and interviews. The collaborative approach aimed to allow “hands‐on” experience of the selected methods, as well as full engagement in negotiating each stage of the project.

Project group meetings and the data generated by participants provided a rich source of learning about methodological issues in education research, in addition to the personal understandings emerging from such a project.

This project reports an approach to “hands‐on” learning of methodological and ethical issues within doctoral development programmes that could be adapted for use on similar programmes. It suggests an alternative to the more common forms of doctoral training (such as exposition, discussion, reading, or simulation) that is of real value to doctoral students in that it enables deep reflection on the journeys that have brought students to doctoral study, whilst at the same time providing a rich resource for methodological learning.

Globally, traditional and online doctoral programs face difficulties with student persistence and progression. An online doctoral school implemented a first-year program sequence taught by a cadre of 20 specialized faculty members who engage in best practices to assist students in persisting and progressing toward program completion.

This qualitative program assessment using content analysis examined the program effectiveness of one online doctoral program's first-year program sequence. Two research questions guided this program assessment, they were: RQ1. Based on online doctoral students' perspectives, what motivators contribute to online doctoral student persistence and progression in an online doctoral program? RQ2. How do online faculty contribute to online doctoral student persistence and progression? Data collection included myriad of program metrics: content area meetings (CAMs); closing the loop assessment data; faculty and student end of course survey data; and faculty and student semistructured interviews.

The resultant themes indicated that students are motivated by support from family, friends and religious beliefs; and students persist based on support from fellow doctoral students and faculty members. Additional themes revealed that faculty members motivate students through building faculty–student relationships, individual coaching, providing university resources and through clarification of program requirements; and faculty members perceive that face-to-face doctoral residencies greatly contribute to student persistence and progression through interpersonal interaction and through improved clarity.

Implications of this program assessment have far-reaching impact on how doctoral granting institutions can structure small cadres of faculty to develop interpersonal relationships with doctoral students with focus on support and development.

This study aims to examine entry-level PhD students’ experiences with participating in Critical Friends, a peer review protocol, used to support learning the threshold concept of literature review. It also sought to determine if, and how, students used the peer review protocol electively during their first year of doctoral study.

The authors used a sequential, QUAL-qual mixed-method design to guide the study. Reflective learning journals, surveys and interviews were collected from three cohorts of PhD students (N = 18).

Thematic analysis revealed that giving and receiving writing critique was uncomfortable for these novice peer reviewers and many described emotional disciplining associated with vulnerability. Critical Friends offered a safe space to begin mastery of the literature review and begin transforming new researcher and writer identities. While Critical Friends was a positive experience for students, they struggled implementing the protocol on their own following the course.

These findings support the need for faculty to embed peer review opportunities in courses during the first year to facilitate role modeling and mentoring. The findings also demonstrate the need to engage students with peer review early in the program to increase comfort, cultivate student resiliency for accepting critical feedback and build capacity for students to learn with and from others.

This paper advocates for the use of peer review practices early in the doctoral study to promote the development of researcher identity and positioning within the research community.