Abstract:

The George Washington University’s Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Off Campus Program Office has been developing and providing a distance-based PhD program in the field of Systems Engineering for the past 10 years. The program, was developed for working professionals in the field of Systems Engineering who are not the typical PhD student and was delivered by mostly part time faculty who are not the typical research oriented faculty. During this time, the full-time faculty management team had to basically replicate the main university functions for the new environment to insure the quality of the program.

For successful delivery, every phase of the program had to be developed. This included training of part time faculty, development of relevant online-based curriculum, development of a virtual research mentoring program and development of a comprehensive program review structure. The development of the research phase of the program was particularly difficult. This involved addressing the following issues. How do you instruct nontraditional working students in the art of academic research? How do you keep virtual students motivated when they are not regularly attending class sessions? How do you handle virtual research mentorship? How do you insure that the online PhD program exhibits the same research stature as a traditional on campus program?

The program has enjoyed both financial and academic success, however, the processes has had to be revamped many times to get to its current form where students are publishing in some of the top journals in System Engineering and Engineering Management. This talk presents an overview of lessons learned and current best practices for conducting distance learning coursework and advising sessions for optimal results for PhD education.

Keywords:

Distance Learning, Research PhD.