Role of Research in Teaching: Analysis of PhD Programs and PhD Graduates at the Open University of Tanzania

Abstract

Africa still has low numbers of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) graduates. PhD programmes avail opportunities to doctoral students pursuing research by thesis or course work. Although existing literature is available on postgraduate students but the numbers of PhD graduates is still insufficient. Furthermore, there are limited studies that have conducted research on PhD programmes and PhD graduates. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to explore PhD programmes and PhD graduates at the Open University of Tanzania (OUT). The specific objective was to examine PhD programmes on offer and the output of PhD graduates. This paper uses literature review method as the source of information for PhD programmes and PhD graduands, and adopts the Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) approach. Content analysis and descriptive statistics were used to provide findings. The findings of this paper showed that although PhD programmes are offered by OUT, the numbers of PhD graduates are inadequate due to reasons such as management style within departments. The outcome of low PhD graduands ranging between 7 to 14 per graduation ceremony for the period 2016 to 2018 implies low output of PhD graduates meaning that ultimately there is less research in terms of research output and therefore, OUT will continue to have study material dependency on other educational institutions instead of research generated within OUT for purposes of teaching and further research. Future research can explore the relationship between research and challenges for Masters’ students in higher education.