Abstract:

The increasing ease of access to digital tools such as Web 2.0 (social media tools) and Web 3.0 (artificial intelligence tools) have made the use of these technologies common practice in some areas of education. Much of the related research about their use within higher education has been undertaken at undergraduate level, leaving the involvement of post-graduate and doctoral students with social media and digital tools fairly unexplored.

Our proposed paper will be based on the experinces of international online students enaged in a fully online Professional Doctorate in HIgher Education , which is jointly managed and delivered by two agencies, one in UK and the other one based in the Netherlands.

This paper aims to explore how the students make use of digital tools in the thesis stage of their doctoral studies and what impact they have had on their studies.

Based on an exploratory case study approach data has been collected in two phases:
1. An online survey of all students in the thesis stage of the programme (28 respondents)
2. A series of online semi-structured interviews with 16 students.

The analysis of the survey data has informed the qualitative stage of data collection. Following individual thematic analysis of the interview data, the research team will compare and integrate findings in order to draw conclusions and make recommendations.

The research is still ongoing and hence the paper will present findings from the online survey and preliminary results derived from the interview analysis possibly.

Keywords:

Web 2.0, web 3.0, social media, artificial intelligence, online doctoral student, e-learning.