Courses - EdD in Organizational Leadership

This course examines classical and contemporary theories and styles of leadership and their application to a variety of professional and global settings. The role of vision, persuasion, mobilizing constituencies, and other dimensions of effective leadership are examined from a theoretical and practitioner perspective. Students conduct research on leadership theories and practices relevant to their particular academic and professional interests.

This course introduces students to the study of ethical leadership and provides the foundation for value clarification, ethical decision making, and responsible leadership in diverse organizations and communities. Elements of ethical leadership such as cultural proficiency, social justice, equity, and privilege are examined. Students will investigate applications and practices relevant to their academic and professional interests.

Students learn statistic distributions, confidence intervals, estimation, effect size, and hypothesis testing. Topics include proper application of statistical methods, analysis of data utilizing statistical software, interpretation of parametric and nonparametric techniques, and presentation of findings in a variety of organizational issues and scholarly pursuits. Students will examine application of statistical analysis and practices relevant to their academic and professional interests.

This course introduces major theories and approaches to research, assessment, and development of public policy. Students develop a policy paper on a topic of their choice at the local, state, regional, or national level. Students will investigate applications and practices of advocacy and social change through policy development relevant to their academic and professional interests.

This course offers students practical experience in policy development at the national level. Students will travel to Washington, DC, or a similar venue; will experience policy development at the federal, state, or local level; and will meet with policy makers, lobbyists, and leaders in government and national associations. Students are required to participate in a trip to Washington, DC, or a similar location. Students will incur travel costs (which vary in relation to airline, hotel, food, venue, and materials). Prerequisite: EDD 753A.

This course examines global issues and policy alternatives at the intersection of technology, innovation, and social change. It applies principles of micro- and macroeconomics to investigate alternative economic distribution systems, taxation, educational challenges, planet sustainability, intellectual property and trade, poverty eradication, social justice, health care, and economic and workforce development. Students will investigate applications and practices of global economics and policy relevant to their academic and professional interests.

This course discusses and examines economic distribution and policy systems with local, national, and global leaders in private and government sectors, public education and learning institutions, social enterprises, health care, and commercial and manufacturing in contrast to the United States. It immerses students in an international destination to gain experiential perspective on alternative economic and policy approaches relevant to their academic and professional interests. Students are required to participate in a trip to an international location. Students will incur travel costs, which vary in relation to venue, airline, hotel, food, and learning material.

This course immerses students, as future global learners, in a dynamic exploration of technology-integrated learning tools and solutions available to global organizations, learning communities, and educational settings. It explores current and future-ready technologies and their intentional application for experiential, collaborative, social, and blended learning across organically or formally developed learning organizations and online communities in K–12, higher education, and private and public sectors. Students will investigate applications and practices in virtual learning relevant to their academic and professional interests.

This course examines legal, political, and regulatory processes and issues confronting organizations. Topics in the course include intellectual property law, educational law, torts, criminal and contract liability, the laws regarding electronic communication, encryption, internet security, and ethics in cyberspace. Dispute resolution and negotiation techniques are also included. Students conduct research on legal principles and practices relevant to their particular academic and professional interests.

This course focuses on analysis, design, development, implementation, and assessment of learning-based solutions to organizational challenges in a variety of learning organization environments including K–12, higher education, and private and public sectors. It introduces models and methods of learning theory and cognition and learning assessments as a response to identified needs and gaps in intended organizational results. Students will investigate applications and practices of learning design, cognition, and evaluation relevant to their academic and professional interests.

This course focuses on innovation and change in organizations in response to environmental and technological induced disruptions they bring to organizations or systems. Organizational change theories and models, futurist literature, and major world trends in innovation that impact sustainable change efforts in education, health care, social enterprises, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, and related disciplines are examined. Topics include models and strategies in anticipating, creating, and managing change; collaboration; overcoming resistance to change; and creativity and innovations. Students will investigate applications and practices of organizational change relevant to their academic and professional interests.

This course explores the theory and practice of designing, conducting, and applying statistical software for analyzing and interpreting data and presenting findings in experimental, quasi-experimental, and nonexperimental procedures for organizational research and evaluation. Sample size planning and methods of assessing the credibility of published research are discussed. Students focus on quantitative measures and the statistical description of variables. Students will investigate applications and practices in quantitative research relevant to their academic and professional interests.

This course introduces students to research designs within the qualitative tradition. Topics include the collection and interpretation of qualitative data and methods of minimizing threats to the trustworthiness and authenticity of qualitative studies. Students learn specific techniques for the analysis and interpretation of qualitative data. Students will be expected to utilize appropriate software to conduct content, semantic, and sentiment analysis relevant to their academic and professional interests.

The course addresses organizations; alignment of organizational structures and intended outcomes; and how they deal with culture, employee behavior, and values. Students will examine strategies designed to create and evaluate knowledge, including the psychological basis for human action, individual and organizational learning, communicating across cultures, and intellectual capital. Students will research and examine organizational theories and practices relevant to their particular academic and professional fields.

Higher Education Professions Preparation (HEPP) course is designed to introduce doctoral students to various professions in higher education. Information will be provided to familiarize doctoral students with the roles and general expectations for teaching, research, service, and leadership responsibilities in higher education environments. Designed to introduce the future academic professional to careers in higher education, topics include types of higher education institution, varied occupations e.g.: administration; tenure track faculty versus non-tenure track faculty; the academic portfolio including the curriculum vitae (CV); peer-reviewed versus non-peer-reviewed research and publishing; grants and why it all matters; etc.

Students examine a broad range of advancements in theory and practice in their respective areas of interest. Examples of possible areas may include social innovation and entrepreneurship; school safety; institutional advancement; innovations and future of learning technologies, such as AI, 3D learning and virtual worlds, aerial, cloud, and mobile technologies; financial management of public institutions; open-source electronic platforms; interactive gadgets or media mashups; managing in technological environments; pre-K–12 administration; private and charter school administration; societal factors affecting education and equity; nonprofit management and leadership; mixed-methodology research methods; and other similar topics. Note: Students may not complete the same area of study for credit more than once.

The purpose of the Comprehensive Examination Seminar is to assess the doctoral student's ability to integrate the doctoral coursework by preparing a paper which will address a real-world problem, dilemma, or issue synthesizing the leadership, learning, and change coursework. The paper will be evaluated and defended orally before a committee of faculty members. Prerequisites: EDD 700, 724, 755, 759, 763, and 765.

Under the direction of a dissertation chairperson, dissertation research is individualized and tailored to aid the student in completing the dissertation requirement. In dissertation study, students engage in preparing their research proposal and hold a preliminary oral with their chair and committee. In order to formally conduct dissertation research under the supervision of a faculty member, or to hold a preliminary or final dissertation defense, students must be enrolled in a Dissertation Research course, Ed 791, EDOL 791, EDLP 791, and PGLC 791. To enroll in a Dissertation Research Course, Ed 791, EDOL 791, EDLP 791, EdD students must have completed EDD 734, EDD 766, and EDD 767. To enroll in PGLC 791, PhD students must have completed EGLC 734, EGLC 766, EGLC 767, and PGLC 734

Dissertation students who have successfully completed the final oral defense of their dissertation and the manuscript modifications required by the dissertation committee may enroll in this course for a fee of $100. A completed Form F4 must be submitted to the associate program director to enroll in this course. Students are eligible to enroll in this course for up to two consecutive semesters. If the dissertation has not been APA-cleared and submitted after two semesters, students will need to re-enroll in the appropriate doctoral dissertation research course.

*This course is not a requirement for degree completion. Students can enroll in ED 792 for a fee of $100 per term for up to two terms to clear APA.

New venture creation, theory, strategy, and practice for organizational leaders are explored. Students will conduct a comprehensive study of the process of shepherding an entrepreneurial idea from formulation to fruition by forming new ventures in for-profit, not-for-profit, and philanthropic organizations.

This course is designed to explore the various research designs and methods used in non-human subject research. Reliance on the definition and guidance from the US Department of Health & Human Services (45CFR Part 46) of what constitutes human subjects research, directs the discussion of empirical processes that do not involve interventions or interactions between an investigator and individual subject or an investigator and identifiable, individual subject data. Examples of non-human subject research include social media mining and sentiment analysis, content analysis of artifacts including online text and images, virtual ethnography (netnography), secondary analysis of aggregated data, or program evaluation not focused on individual subjects.

This course will provide an integrated approach for students to explore Resilient Leadership in theory and practice. To be resilient leaders students need to first understand that leadership isn’t always about the circumstance, but instead how they as leaders respond to those circumstances. The course builds on existing knowledge around leadership theory, ethics, emotional and social intelligence, as well as the relational nature of leadership. It will immerse students in dialogue around trust, respect, mindfulness, and community. The course will be focused on identifying practices that lead to resilience and understanding how leaders can integrate those practices and transform their leadership approach.

This course builds on the theory of spiritual leadership (Fry, 2003) that is initially grounded in an intrinsic motivation model that incorporates vision, hope/faith, altruistic love, and theories of the workplace.

This course is designed to extend your understanding of both mixed and multiple methods research designs. The main objective and assignment in this course is the development of an integrated, targeted literature review of existing knowledge regarding mixed and multiple methods research methodology. Mixed methods research refers to research designs including both a quantitative and qualitative component. Multiple methods are commonly labeled as Case Study research designs and include multiple data sources and data gathering procedures. While textbooks may support your learning, other sources will include published reports of empirical studies found in the scholarly literature that report on research involving mixed or multiple methods designs. This section of 785 has applicability to your dissertation process as it will help you refine your understanding of research methodology and guide decisions regarding the choice of research design.

Other assignments include participating in virtual sessions and asynchronous activities focused on enhancing your literature review skills; taking advantage of electronic tools for building and searching your electronic library; differentiating components of a dissertation proposal; understanding the Pepperdine Dissertation Process including human subjects’ considerations and the e-Protocol system used by our Institutional Review Board (IRB).

This course is designed to introduce you to research designs that employ quantitative ethnography (QE) and to tools that enable QE designs, including epistemic network analysis (ENA), a federally funded software platform. The joint application of QE and ENA (QE/ENA) is gaining recognition as a means to enhance the analytic clarity of thick qualitative studies through discourse coding and graph theory. A primary. advantage of QE is relational: it not only permits the elaboration of constructs that a qualitative study might examine, but furnishes sophisticated tools to model how the constructs interact, with mathematically grounded validity. This enables visualization of differences between and within individuals and groups, including before and after interventions or treatments.

Much of statistics with quantitative methods was developed to resolve data scarcity, using data samples to make inferences or generalizations about large populations of interest. In contrast, usually with smaller or case study samples, ethnographic and qualitative studies seek to enable descriptions of human behavior and interaction, descriptions that usually elude quantitative studies but become increasingly problematic as data sets expand. QE can be thought of as a science of using potentially large rather than limited datasets to enable qualitatively rich elaboration of research constructs and, most importantly, the relationships between them. This section of 785 walks students through samples from the growing corpus of QE and ENA supported research, and introduces them to hands-on coding and data preparation. Students will generate visual models of multiple social and individual phenomena, focusing on their planned dissertation research.

Story provides a vehicle for making sense of the world and enhances our ability to engage with others to effect change. This course examines the ontology, epistemology, and axiology of story as a powerful change instrument via art, research, technology, and science (ARTS). The nature of story is explored through scientific inquiry relative to neuroscience research along with the cultural and psycho-social value of story including its enduring appeal and proactivity to adapt to innovative technologies. Curating and creating stories, narratives, meta-narrative, and micro-narratives offer opportunities to generate compelling visions of possible futures useful for leaders, researchers, and new content builders. Students will develop an artifact commensurate with that of peer-reviewed scholarship.

In this course, candidates reflect upon the theory of knowledge and researcher identity as key areas of philosophy. Discussions will focus on issues in ontology and epistemology. Candidates will study the philosophy of mind which is concerned with the relationship between the human mind and the physical world. In metaphysics, candidates will explore the investigation of reality. Candidates will be introduced to classical and contemporary texts in global intellectual traditions.

Social enterprises are helping make a change and blending a profit organization with real social innovation. This course will clarify the definition and meaning of Social Entrepreneurship and will focus on the need to learn about the source and root of a social problem. You will learn about tools that will help you to detect an opportunity and develop an idea of how to create a business for social change. You will be asked to ideate about a problem topic that you want to address with your social venture. You will then research and validate this opportunity and identify a purpose for your social venture project. Specifically, you will develop a business model using the Lean Model or Business Model Canvas. By the end of the course, you will be able to compare different social impact investment methods and choose the right funding strategy for your social venture. Furthermore, you will determine growth strategies and how you can scale or replicate your business plan in order to reach a larger number of customers, suppliers, and clients.

The course will examine a number of tenets and principles of social psychology to leadership theory and practice. The course will focus on theories such as Naïve Realism, Objectivity Illusion, Biased Perceptions of Consensus, and other similar tenets discussed in contemporary social psychology writing. Classical tenets such as self-esteem, self-efficacy and locus of control will also be discussed including psychometric tools and approaches used in their measurement. Finally, the course will focus on the relationship between these topics and exemplary practices in local and global leadership, and the present research in this area.

Students examine a broad range of advancements in theory and practice in their respective areas of interest. This course will provide an integrated approach for students to further explore the theory and practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Students will be exposed to a variety of topics centered on what it means to be inclusive. How diversity impacts leadership within organizations, and how diversity is perceived within the societal constructs. Students will also explore emerging trends and topics related to the many challenges faced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Other areas of discussion will center around gender norms, ableism, and ageism.

This course will further explore core issues of personal leadership, equity, and social justice through the lenses of Critical Race Theory, Appreciate Inquiry, and Restorative Justice. Particular attention will be given to social challenges such as anti-racism, microaggressions, feminism, hegemony, equity, gender norms, intersectionality, ableism, and ageism.

This course utilizes the principles of experiential learning, technology, and analysis of design principles of learning theory and learning assessments to provide students with an innovative and entrepreneurial opportunity. University students from developed countries will collaborate with international university students from low-income countries to conduct research to design an interconnected system of learning at the university level. The course emphasizes topics such as economic mobility of university students from low-income countries, the science of university program design, access of students to a high-quality education, the importance of economic scale, and the global impact of the power of a collaborative network and connectivity.

Students will deeply explore areas of interest within a broad range of advancements in learning theory, technology, and practice with a high potential for innovation and change. Technologies such as A1, blockchain, virtual worlds (xR), social media, cloud and mobile technologies, open-source electronic platforms, interactive tools, media mashups, loT technological environments are open for investigation and discussion. Exploration may also include recent learning theories, connectionism, computational models and neurobiological discoveries, and other similar topics that will inform the future of learning. Students will collaboratively discuss, document, and present their work.

Leadership is a multi-disciplinary subject, as it deals with the complexity of human behavior. This course will examine several tenets and principles of psychology as they relate to leadership theory and practice. The course will begin with examining relevant social psychology theories such as Obedience and influence, Naïve Realism, Objectivity Illusion, Biased Perceptions of Consensus, and other similar tenets discussed in contemporary social psychology writing. Attention will be given to how these tenets contribute to social manipulation and flaws in logical reasoning. To explore identifying, managing, and interpreting behaviors of self and others, classical tenets such as self-esteem, self-efficacy, and locus of control will also be discussed. Personality theory and development, type, and preferences will be examined. Psychometric tools and approaches used to measure personality preferences (MMF, and DiSC) and their application to leadership coaching will be studied. A broader examination of the Dark Triangle as it relates to leading others will be examined. Finally, the course will focus on the relationship between these topics and exemplary practices in local and global leadership, and the present research in this area.

This course is designed for EdD students who want to learn more about the vast world of accreditation. In particular, in this course, students will begin to understand the value of accreditation beyond compliance, and how the process brings the entire institution together, as well as institutions’ once in a while opportunity to learn from peers. Whether in a K-12 setting or in a higher education setting, from institutional accreditation to specialized accreditation, how standards are formed and criteria for reviews are reflected in self-study processes. An in-depth review of this ongoing accreditation and reaffirmation process will be presented. Also, the impact of the 2020 federal changes to accrediting agencies will be discussed along with the implications of the new Florida law mandating universities to switch accreditors. Other topics, such as why curricular changes are not agile, methods of assessment are complex, assessment plans vary, program reviews are cyclical, and the importance of internal and external reviews all make up parts of the learning outcomes.

This course will acquaint students with various theoretical approaches within Information Seeking Behavior. Doctoral students will develop expertise in identifying the highest quality, most relevant, and most influential scholarly studies within their chosen research topics.  Assignments and exercises will prepare students to delineate the precise state of scholarship, anticipate the trajectory(ies) and needs/gaps of the research within a field, and be able to articulate the origins and emergence of a field of study.  Moreover, through lectures, readings, and exercises students will gain both a deep and broad understanding of the complicated information universe, including, but not limited to: peer review, (its essential contributions to science, as well as critiques of and challenges to the practice such as predatory publishing); new measures of scholarly impact(such as Altmetrics); open access publishing contributions and challenges; publishing models that both enhance and hinder scholarly communication.