E-supervision: a new tool for enhancing PhD education in Africa
Nadja Gmelch, Associació Catalana D´Universitats Públiques, Spain; Ismael Peña-López, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
e-Supervision: enhancing the international debate.
Ismael Peña-López
E-supervision – a new approach to supervision of international doctoral candidates? Opportunities and challenges.
Nadja Gmelch
Opportunities
- Digital identity and visibility.
- International network.
- Open access.
- Peer to peer supervision.
- Cotutelle.
- Co-creation of knowledge.
Challenges
- Recognition and accreditation.
- Incentives.
- Quality assurance.
- Change in mindset.
- Leadership.
Discussion
What to use? The problem is not readiness, but capacity building on tools, protocols, procedures.
There already are (offline) practices to engage in a community, but at the very local (department) level. How to scale that? How to open these (closed) practices out to the world?
Virtual campuses and the digitization of universities are good starting points for e-supervision.
Communities are for sure a good strategy. But it is not that easy to build a community and, especially, to facilitate it.
Reluctance to share research
Reluctance of some students to be online
A shared blogs to engage with other students and help them
Incentives have an impact on quality.
Openness may have an impact on recognition of ownership of the results/ideas.
How much of the content you are producingwas actually created by you… and what portion by the extended commumity? What is your marginal contribution?
– happens everytime, e.g. at lunch
– at least online there’s a trace of who said what
It is not more important who provided a piece of information, but the outcome of the whole group.
We should redefine publishing
Some guidelines of what is research in the XXIst century would help.
