"There’s no place like home" – Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz
After a long and arduous search I thought I had settled on doing a research-only PhD through India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University. I knew someone there from my volunteer work in international education who was willing to connect me with the right people, it was very inexpensive, and since my family and I were ultimately planning to return to live permanently in the Caribbean, the international aspect wasn’t a drawback.
Meanwhile I had dismissed all the American programs I’d considered because they were too expensive or required inconvenient residencies that would have required me to use too much of my vacation time to attend. (That’s right, I work for a university, but would still have had to use annual leave to attend a doctoral program residency. And help with tuition was out of the question. Go figure.)
But there was one other option I hadn’t yet researched. One of the other hats I wear in life is that I help moderate the forum here on eLearners. It’s a great online place where anyone with questions about distance learning can ask in a friendly environment, and get an answer back from knowledgeable people within a short time. We don’t only recommend eLearners partners on the forum, but since eLearners only works with accredited schools and many of them are really good choices for a lot of students, I’ve become familiar with them over time. One day I was looking through our database trying to help out someone who’d asked a question, and I realized that I didn’t know that much about A.T. Still University, one of the few that offer a doctoral program.
So I started reading about them. The program they offered was different from the others in that it wasn’t generic education, it was Health Education. At first I thought that wouldn’t be a good fit for me. I’m an educational technologist and administrator; I haven’t done anything in the area of healthcare, other than providing support to students and faculty in allied health and nursing programs. But then I realized that it might be an interesting way to combine my interests in educational technology and distance learning with another aspect of my life.
You see, about two years ago or so, I changed to a vegan lifestyle. That means I don’t use animal products. Like vegetarians, I don’t eat meat, but I go beyond that, avoiding other animal products in food, like dairy and eggs, and also avoiding animal products that aren’t food, like leather and wool. My motivation was that I’d read and seen what sort of wretched lives and gruesome deaths those animals endure, even the ones not used directly for food, and I just didn’t want to be a part of that system anymore.
So I came to wonder whether researching and teaching on the nutritional aspects of a vegan diet would qualify as “health education”, and contacted the school to ask them whether that would interest them. It turned out they were enthusiastic about that topic, and as I learned more and more about the program I found that the coursework revolved around higher education administration, and it was mainly the research and dissertation that were health based.
The program also had a number of other interesting characteristics that I liked. The most important was that the tuition rate was very reasonable for an American program. I also appreciated that there weren’t any required residencies. It’s not that I don’t recognize the potential value of an in-person meeting, but from a practical standpoint in my life I knew traveling for school would be very difficult. Another really neat aspect to the program was that the research and dissertation writing weren’t a separate phase from the coursework. In this program I would be working on the research for my dissertation from the very first course, and conducting it and writing about it would be central to the coursework. That meant that once I would be done with the coursework, I would be done with the program, a very attractive feature, and one I’d only seen in one other program (the Executive Doctor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, a great program for those who, unlike me, can afford its $110,000 price tag).
So I liked the program, but what about the school? A.T. Still University is a medical school in Kirksville, Missouri that was founded in 1892. For over a century all they were was a medical school, but in the last few years they’ve added a School of Management that offered the Doctor of Health Education program. I thought that was a really interesting pedigree. Moreover, ATSU is different from most medical schools because it’s an osteopathic school. That means that their programs, while comparable to other medical schools, have a more holistic view of healthcare that looks at the wellness of the whole individual rather than looking at individual maladies as problems to be solved on their own. I really liked this attitude toward the whole person, and decided if this education program includes that perspective that it would be an excellent fit.
Next up, my experience with online orientation.