Educational policy-making in managing undergraduate English majors' graduation thesis writing

Abstract

The frequent complaints from various levels about undergraduate thesis quality and its chronic problems over the years have brought up the current reformative policy exploration on teaching and tutoring undergraduate English majors' thesis writing online. This policy, characteristic of distributive, regulatory, evidence-based, democratic, sustainable and lifelong learning frameworks, was formulated after consulting higher level authorities, surveying students' and tutors' opinions, and then reviewed by the department academic committee before its implementation. It neither rejects nor belittles the teaching and tutoring of students' graduation thesis in the conventional way. Instead, it provides an alternative of distance learning for migrating seniors, opens up the possibility of writing and defending thesis online, facilitates the communication between all parties involved, and enables the administrators to monitor the learning, teaching and tutoring processes and to receive feedbacks from all anonymous users. It is argued that the e-governance of undergraduate English majors' graduation thesis writing can better counter possible policy risks with the combined efforts of all parties, and therefore predicts an optimistically foreseeable result.