Planning the remaining time

On Monday this week, I met with some of the level 3 Education and Community Development students who are due to submit dissertations in December.

Each of the students who attended the session described their project, where they were up to with it, the challenges they were facing and what their next steps were going to be.

In addition these students were asked to explain the community development focus of their research project. This is because, if your degree is going to be BA Education and Community Development, you should aim to ensure that there is a community development focus to your independent research project. You might need to use your dissertation to secure employment in future.

To give your research project a 'community development' focus, you should be looking to core modules for topics and issues to address in your research. These core modules are: ED1004 Communities, Learning and Education; ED1015 Diaspora Communities in the UK; ED2046 Community Development; Theory and Practice; ED2500 Voluntary Work .

Because you must choose the topic you will cover in your independent research in the Research Methods module ED2000, the modules you do at level 3 can only inform the project as it develops.

There may be some of you who, at level 2, looked ahead and studied the module guides for level 3 modules in order to identify topics to cover in your dissertations. For those planning to do this ED3002 Contemporary Issues in Education and Training is the only core module at level 3 but there are other modules whose themes would make good topics for independent research e.g. ED3022 Gender Security and Education For All and ED3033 E-Learning: Communication, Cooperation and Collaboration Online.

Module guides for all modules can be downloaded from the School of Education Notice Board in UEL Plus and will have a list of topics covered as well as reading lists in the field.

The other thing we did on Monday, that is worth sharing, was to plot the time remaining until the dissertation is due. The deadline for those writing up ED3000 this semester is 3.00 pm. Tuesday 8th December, 2009. This means the work must be in before 3.00 pm on Tuesday 8th December 2009 and on the basis of where those who attended the session said they were up to, this is how, we thought, the remaining time until the submission date could be organised:

• 16th October - have completed the revision of the literature review
  
• 2nd November - have done the data collection.
• 16th November - have done the data analysis
• 23rd November - have your first draft ready for proof reading and putting through Turnitin.

The experience of students resitting the module (resulting in a cap of 40%) suggests that it is essential to keep back ups of your work at all stages. Have a copy on your UEL network Desk Top, the hard drive of your computer at home (if you have one), your lap top (if you have one) as well as a flash drive. Make sure that you label these copies correctly so that you know which copy you have at each location.