Doctoral Consortia can be transformational experiences for PhD candidates. But what makes them work well, and how do you evaluate their impact?
CIC’s team have been involved for over a decade in both leading and participating in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge. Here’s our analysis of how it functions as induction into the community of practice — joint work by CIC’s Simon Buckingham Shum and Yuveena Gopalan, working with Rebecca Ferguson at the UK Open University.
Rebecca Ferguson, Yuveena Gopalan, and Simon Buckingham Shum. 2025. What’s the Value of a Doctoral Consortium? Analysing a Decade of LAK DCs as a Community of Practice. In Proceedings of the 15th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 702–712. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706468.3706563
Abstract: Since 2013, the Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference has included a Doctoral Consortium (DC). We frame the DC as a structured entry into the LAK community of practice (CoP). CoPs generate five types of value for their members: immediate, potential, applied, realised and reframing. This study used a survey of the 92 DC students from the first decade, supplemented with scientometric analysis of LAK publications, to address the questions: ‘What value do students gain from attending the LAK doctoral consortium?’ and ‘Do students gain the same value from face-to-face and virtual doctoral consortia?’ Reflexive thematic analysis of responses showed that students gained a wide range of immediate and potential value from the DC, which in many cases also prompted changes in practice, performance improvement or redefinition of success. However, the value reported by respondents who had attended virtually was more limited. This paper’s contributions are (i) the first systematic documentation of student perceptions of LAK DCs, (ii) identification of ways in which doctoral consortia can be developed in the future, and (iii) specific attention to how virtual DCs can offer greater value for both participants and the host community of practice.