Professional Doctorate in Hearing Therapy - Professional Doctorate

Gain a Professional Doctorate in Hearing Therapy by studying rehabilitative practices and developing communication and counselling skills. Through critical and original reading of audiological practices, you will be equipped to enable problem solving and application of audiology to marginalised and complex patient groups.

Course summary

The Professional Doctorate in Hearing Therapy course can be broken into four stages. You have the option of taking each of the four stages in order, or it is possible to exit the course at any of the stages, enabling you to be flexible with your level of commitment at the outset. It is also possible to take any of the following modules independently as they are offered as part of the School of Life and Health Sciences Continuing Professional Development portfolio.

The programme is based on blended-learning to enable it to be conducted while you remain in practice and applying the knowledge you gain from lectures to complete you assignments and case records based on theory and evidence-based practice.

The number of taught elements taken at any time is flexible:

• MSc. programme requires six taught modules (120 credits) to be undertaken along with a research methods tuition and written research dissertation (60 credits total) (all within 5-6 years)
• DHearing Therapy requires nine taught modules (180 credits) plus a full practice-based research project (all within 6-7 years)
• Research Methods is a core module for MSc. and doctorate students.

Taught modules are available once per year, with start dates 1st October, and are 20 credits each (nominally equivalent to 200 hours of student learning). All modules (excluding Hearing Therapy Counselling and Communication Skills) consist of remote access lectures with online tests for feedback and a module coursework assignment, such as an essay related to the module. 

Modules

• Hearing Therapy Counselling and Communication Skills: this module is taught on campus face to face over five days in a block of three days (October) and two days (January)
• Tinnitus Management
• Adult Rehabilitation
• Health Behaviours
• Evidence Based Practice
• Vestibular Rehabilitation
• Research Methods
• Research Proposal
• Research project

Doctor of Hearing Therapy modules (choose from):

• Quantitative methods and advanced statistics
• Qualitative research methodology

The research review dissertation (MSc.) or full project (DHearingTherapy) is the major component of the programme, supervised by members of the Aston Audiology department. You will develop your ideas and proposals guided by staff members with appropriate research interests. Because this is a distance-learning programme, research projects are not normally carried out on the University campus, and it is essential that the student has access to the facilities and resources needed to carry out the research, usually in the student's place of work.

Please note: details provided are intended to give an overview of the proposed aims and content in modules.