University of Otago College of Education teaching fellow David Berg on Saturday became the first person to graduate with a recently established Otago doctor of education degree.
The college's EdD programme was launched in 2008 as an alternative doctoral-level degree to the PhD. It is not aimed at professional researchers, but at scholarly or researching teachers, whose research projects are linked to their professional practice, organisers say.
Mr Berg worked as a teacher in Liverpool for 10 years and in Nepal for a year before coming to Otago, initially to do a PhD. He decided to pursue the EdD programme because he liked its close linking of theory and practice.
It is mainly a distance programme, with students required to be on campus only for one five-day residential school in the first and second years.
Otago Prof Kwok-Wing Lai, who designed the course, said the new programme had proved popular, with a roll of 27.
