Research pertaining to graduate students in distance education and their thesis research process is woefully constrained. Consequently, potentially important research and research areas remain unexplored. This presentation explores specifically the issues graduate students experience conducting the research phase of the thesis, including the challenges students may encounter to recruit participants.

Streams of research identified in the presentation are: online graduate work broadly, to create context around how graduate study emerged, the value of graduate work, and central issues; the particular case of thesis research students who work in an online environment; graduate student researchers in higher education, on campus or distance education and their access to research participants; and access to research participants in an online environment, whether it is different from campus based access and if so how.

The paucity of research into the issues graduate students face when actually doing research is cause for concern. Research universities that have a focus in distance education must be aware of these challenges if they are to unfetter the constraints faced by their graduate students.