Location
St Luke’s Campus, Exeter; also available via distance learning
We have developed this MSc to support research students and for students interested in a specific area of education. Students attend one or two weekly twilight sessions during term-time dependent on whether the full- or part-time option is selected. The programme can also be studied with no attendance at Exeter by distance learning.
It can be taken either as a stand-alone Masters or as a precursor to a PhD. The four taught modules of the MSc are required research training for all Four-Year PhD and MPhil/PhD students. The programme meets the current ESRC training guidelines for the preparation of doctoral students and allows students to apply for ‘1+3’ ESRC studentships (see information on Funding for further details). The overall purpose of this MSc is to prepare you for the independent conduct of educational research.
For doctoral students the programme is designed to provide high quality training, both to enable you to carry out doctoral research and to equip you to pursue other research activities. Other potential career opportunities include practitioner and academic educationists: your acquired general social science research skills can be used in different contexts and applied to a variety of problems.
You will be able to specialise in a particular field of education, within a research preparation framework or context and benefit from collaboration with fellow students in small online groups on directed activities.
Distance students follow the taught modules through listening to online recorded presentations that correspond to campus sessions. Distance students also join the small online groups with campus students for the directed activities and have occasional online live links to campus sessions, e.g. for a debate and online group presentations.
If English is your second language, we offer a supplementary support.
The programme aims to equip you with:
- a good grasp of the central ideas, concepts, debates, theories, philosophies and approaches employed by educational researchers;
- a critical understanding of the main methodologies of educational research and strategies to decide which are appropriate to the problems they are investigating;
- skills and understanding to conduct research projects independently using any of the main methodologies of educational research;
- knowledge of and skills in the various forms of communicating and disseminating educational research.
