Research Proposal - Write, Defend & Get Your Study Approved

We've prepared a consolidated guide for you to download and keep for reference as you go through the lessons and in the future if you need a refresher. Check out this lesson for a quick preview and inside the course you can download the PDF from the lesson.

Throughout this course we will celebrate your progress at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. I really want you to succeed but you need to take action and keep going so look forward to these milestones of progress. I will see you there and cheer you on as you keep going from one milestone to the next >>

This is your opportunity to share something about yourself with the rest of the students in this course. Tell us all about your goals and what you want to achieve. You can come back to this board and add more thoughts as you go through the course and achieve your goals. Seeing all the other students in the course will also motivate you and keep you going as you participate in this community of learning.

Welcome to this course. In the lessons i teach you how to approach and complete all the different aspects of your research proposal. No matter what stage you are at, you will benefit from doing this course and I would advise going through all the lessons so that you get a complete picture of everything, especially because a lot of what you learn now will also be applicable in the rest of your degree.

I was interviewing a student for my podcast recently. She had just achieved a distinction and I asked her what was the secret of her success in the early stage of her study. She very clearly answered that she read as much as she could get her hands on about her topic. She knew roughly what she wanted to research but it was only as she read widely that she got a sense of all the different views and issues in that particular field.

You clearly need to define the motivation for your study. This links to the problem statement - you may have identified a valid problem to solve, but is it an important problem to solve? What’s the significance of your research? If you need to apply for funding then this will be critical. How will the world benefit if your study successfully answers your research questions and follows the path you described in your thesis statement?

In academic research, you define how you are going to do a study in your methodology. Your results will only make sense in the context of how you produced them. Someone must be able to reproduce your method so that your results can have wider application. Your method describes the route you will take through your study to get it done you will need to describe the techniques you will use. are you doing interviews, surveys, laboratory work, experiments.

You might not be required to present your proposal for approval. But even so, its a very good practice to arrange a presentation with your supervisors and possibly some other experts in your field. Your proposal is a bit like a contract between you and your institution. You have written down what you are going to do, why its important and how you are going to do it. In return, your institution commits to supporting your study and giving you the credibility you will need to actually get it done.

Are you studying and need help? ??? Do you need a breakthrough in a specific area of your degree? Join thousands of my other students that have learnt to: write, plan, reference, get motivated, organise their time and benefit from so many more tips and techniques. ?Achieve your goals! Write better, research better, finish your reports! Study harder, go further, get your degree and make your contribution. My name is Peter Alkema and I am your online student success coach. I have PhD and I've helped thousands of my students achieve their goals, like Flora Makgale: "What an amazing course! After finishing this course, I have confidence. Thank so much Dr Peter Alkema" Tulongeni Shilunga: "This is exactly the jump-start I needed. Very clear and concise." Lebogang Tswelapele: "This is what I have been longing for" Paskalia Ndapandula: "Peter speaks with so much clarity" Werner van Wyk: "Thank you Peter, once again your lesson and course have given me so much knowledge and understanding" Yvonne Rudolph "I really look forward to take everything i learned in action" Josephine Mahlangu: "exactly what I needed to know, absolutely valuable and helpful for my personal growth"

So let’s dive in and let me explain how we will be working together to get you the success you desire as a student. Before I introduce each of the 6 steps, let me just go through how the course works. Firstly you must take action to really achieve your goals, so there are activities for each of the 6 steps and a couple of assignments. For each of the 6 steps, go through the lessons, then take action by putting what you have learnt into practice – don’t worry I’ll explain everything you need to do – it’s a guaranteed recipe for your success. There is also a logical sequence to the 6 steps, they each build on the previous one, so try and go through them in order.

Introduce yourself to your fellow students and tell us all what you want to achieve with this course. Hear an inspiring podcast interview with a senior lecturer who talks all about what it takes to be successful as a student

Prof Ivan Hofsajer co-ordinates postgrad students in the faculty of engineering at Wits University Johannesburg. He has strong views about how the world of tertiary learning needs to change and adapt. His tips on writing have helped me in my own PhD and he explains the difference for lecturers and students between online learning and traditional lectures.

He believes that "content will be amazing" because of market places but we will be frustrated by the lack of impact it will actually have on students. We have to find a new way of digitising the social compact that students have with eachother and their lecturer and supervisors should really be called advisors. Listen to this episode for a candid reflection from a very experienced lecturer on postgrad writing, research and student success.

So the first step is to develop a habit of reading, thinking & writing. The most important part of this is writing, but these three all go together and in all my experience of running postgraduate workshops, coaching students, doing weekly webinars and moderating a student group I;ve truly seen the importance of writing as a fundamental aspect of student success. But your writing needs to reflect your thinking and you feed your thinking by reading as much as possible in your field. If you develop this habit early on and keep it going then this forms the foundation for student success

Overview Article And PDF Guide To 6 Steps To Student Success

In the resources section of this article is a downloadable PDF for you to use as a reference.

It contains the key points from each of the 6 steps and will remind you what to focus on so that you can successfully complete your research based degree with confidence.

In this wipeboard lesson I teach an overview of the Six Steps for your journey to success. The lesson will give you the broad understanding of the course so that you can dive in to the individual lessons, resources and activities. In my experience of coaching and teaching thousands of postgrad students over many years (and doing my own PhD) I find these 6 steps are the most important things for students to get right. Join me for one of my signature wipeboard lessons!

All the great coaches will tell you the same thing: success comes from what you do, not who you are or what you’ve learnt. You have to take action, and actions must start small, you’ve heard it said that success comes from habits, and that is absolutely true of student success. And the most important habit you can develop is that of reading, writing and thinking. Sure there are other habits like good eating, exercise and so on but as an academic habit, you must read, write and think. These are also interdependent, you can’t do them independently of each other.

When I run my writing workshops, I ask who is busy with a final report. Then I ask those people if they wish they had started later than they did. No one does. No one ever feels they started writing too early. So what I want to teach you in this lesson is the importance of writing as early as possible. Also I want you to see the importance of writing often. There is an important relationship between writing and thinking and your thoughts only become structured once you write them down. Once you’ve written them down then that informs your thinking and vice versa. And lastly, its important to write well. At postgraduate level and especially phd, the primary measure of your success will be your writing. Your final report is yours, it’s a writing deliverable. You need to get as good as possible at writing and you will finish your degree.

Then lets talk about writing often. We’ve spoken about discussion papers, and this will keep your formal academic writing skills going. Some degrees are done by publication which means you are aiming to publish a few journal papers, combine them and that will be your final report, this is at a higher level of writing as those articles will be peer reviewed. So you will have to regularly do very good quality academic writing. I had a question in a webinar about doing a thesis by publication and I suggested that if you are proficient, established and already published as an academic writer then it makes sense, simply because of the pressure of academic writing and the need to get published in order to graduate. If you do a normal thesis, it doesn’t mean you only have to worry about writing at the end of your study when you write up your final report. You must keep your writing going throughout your degree.

Lastly let’s talk about writing well. I’ve launched 2 online courses on this topic and taught a writing workshop for five years where we get to grips with certain principles and practices of writing, and how to write with meaning and clarity. I’ll summarise a few key ideas that I find important for people who want to write better. Firstly, make sure you have a golden thread written down and visible whenever you write. These would be a few keywords and sentences that keep you on your main topic. If someone asks you what you are researching, this would be your answer. As you write, make sure these keywords are sprinkled throughout your writing. This is called signposting your work, people need to follow a common idea through your work.

So, write early, write often and write well, Taken together these three form a powerful combination and if you do them regularly and in combination then you have taken the first important step towards your student success. This foundational habit will serve you all the way through your studies. In fact I would say make sure you get this habit right before you try the others. Or if you struggle with the others, then there’s a good chance you need to refine this habit and as we know, habits require repetition.

Step number 2 on your journey to success is to set up your weekly status report. Now it doesn’t matter if you don’t have supervisors – find someone who will hold you accountable for your studies and agree that you can send them your weekly status report. Normally you would have supervisors and this step is really geared towards managing your relationship with your supervisors, streamlining your communication with them and getting you to apply a regular review of your tasks and progress throughout your degree.

Here’s how it worked for me, and I strongly suggest you just do exactly the same thing and I personally guarantee that if you keep it up, and do it properly then it will make a massive difference. So, what I did was to send an email to my supervisors every Sunday night which contained my status report, it was a very simple report but gave my supervisors a quick snapshot of where I was and what I needed from them. Your relationship with your supervisors will be an important aspect of your studies and this is one way of helping to manage that. In all the workshops and presentations I have done to fellow students, I have shared this practice and shown people exactly whats in this email and how it works.

Then the actual status report, I put a heading as simply “Status Report – Peter Alkema” then I list my supervisors below that heading. What that does is subtly remind them that they do have an important role to play and on the university system they are linked to the success or failure of your degree, even if it is indirectly. Then I give the date of the report and the overall status, ie Red, Green or Amber. Red would be a major issue that I cannot recover from without their help, Amber would be some serious issues but I am working on sorting them out and obviously green means all on track, and generally my supervisors probably didn’t read further if my status report was green.

You should aim to avoid sending your supervisor any other email during the week, and they will get used to the fact that if they want an update on where you are they will see that on Monday morning in every single week of your study and it will combine all the relevant topics they might need – progress, next steps, and any issues. Sure there will be busier times when you will need to do other emails with them and have more communications, but the general steady state way of communicating with your supervisors should consolidate everything in this weekly status update. Also by limiting your bullet points to 5 each it doesn’t mean you aren’t doing anything else, its actually the opposite, it shows you are on top of your degree. I actually put in the headings, done last week, and then in brackets (maximum 5 things) and to do next week, (maximum 5 things). As you count each week and you combine your supervisor communications in a weekly update you will get the structure and discipline you need to finish your degree.

So you’ve learnt all about the weekly status report and your activity is to set one up for yourself. If you have supervisors then discuss it with them first. In fact I had a question from a student in a webinar recently when they asked if they should discuss with their supervisor. Check out my response in the video in the resources of this lesson.

In this step, you will learn practical techniques for how to use Kanban boards as a practice throughout your degree. I teach you exactly how these boards work, why they are so powerful and how they help you visualise your workflow. You will actually apply these principles in your own situation so you achieve your goals of being more productive in your studies and getting things done so that you can be successful

You’ve probably seen a Kanban board in action, but maybe you’ve never really thought about how best to use it or what are the principles behind it that make it so powerful. I’ll teach these to you and I’ll draw on examples from my own experience so you have practical insights that you will benefit from as we go through the material. Kanban boards can be physically up on a whiteboard or a wall somewhere, or they can be electronic on a software platform like JIRA. It’s important that you understand the first and then you can figure out which format works best for your needs.

In this wipeboard lesson I give a practical demonstration of exactly how a Kanban board would work so that you can apply it to your individual student tasks and be more successful. The kanban board I demo in this lesson is a physical version, while you can apply the same principles with a digital kanban board as well. These wipeboard lessons are very popular with my students - find out why!

In this demonstration lesson I walk you through the key features of Trello which is a task management software that is designed using the principles of Kanban. There are many different templates for various requirements but I show you how to set up a digital Kanban board from scratch using the simplest method of To-Do > In-Progress > Done. Trello is a powerful and popular Kanban tool if you want to set your Kanban board up digitally. The version I demo is free, and everything you need in this course is available in the free version of Trello, but some additional features may require upgrading if you require them.

In this demonstration lesson I show you EXACTLY how I planned the last 6 months of my PhD when I had to get a huge amount of writing done to finish my thesis. I used a calendar to map out week by week which sections I was going to be working on and what the milestone were throughout the 6 months, leading up to when we the thesis had to be submitted to external examiners. This process was also very useful to manage my supervisors input to the document because I allocated them 2 distinct periods of time when they would review it and provide me with feedback. The plan worked! Find out how in this lesson.

In these lessons you will learn how to get through the proposal stage of your research. If you are starting a postgraduate qualification with research then you will need to put a proposal together which clearly sets out everything about your study. A research proposal is also an important document for the rest of your degree and in the lessons I teach you how to approach and complete all the different aspects of your research proposal. No matter what stage you are at, you will benefit from doing this step and I would advise going through all the lessons so that you get a complete picture of everything, especially because a lot of what you learn now will also be applicable in the rest of your degree.

Your proposal really sets you up for the rest of your study so its worth doing it as well as possible. your proposal needs to answer 3 main questions: number 1, what are you going to do in your study? Secondly, why should you be doing this study and lastly how are you going to do it. If you think about your final objective, its to complete and pass a thesis or dissertation. These three aspects of your proposal actually link directly with some key sections of your final document at the end of your degree, so its worth doing them well now, and then you will be in a better position later on.

In this wipeboard lesson I sketch the 3 main areas of focus for your proposal; these will cover 80% of your work and your writing to complete a research proposal. I take you through each one, as well as how they link with each other to create an overall complete picture of your study.

In your proposal its critical to explain to your readers exactly what you are going to do in your study. This links your study with the world of the reader. What’s the background to your study? what problem will it solve? and what contribution will a successful study make to the world? This is where all the background reading will come in useful. you learned about this in another lesson and i gave you some homework to write up a few questions of your own interest and get reading in the relevant literature.