ICTlogy

Questions/guidelines prepared by the session moderator, Ismael Peña-López

• How can e-supervision be implemented on a large scale?
• What measures should be taken?
• What resources would be needed?
• What incentives should be offered (if any) to the supervisors?
• Are supervisors able – in terms of skills and competences – to go on with e-supervision? What skills/training should they have?
• What different roles can be identified campus-wide when putting up an e-supervision programme? What actors?

• How do we assess e-supervision itself?
• How do we assess the outcomes of e-supervision (i.e. research)?
• How do we make sure quality of research stays at its highest level?
• Can e-supervision “distract” researchers from their original work (i.e. focus in the forms and not the ends)?

 

• Do you think that e-supervision could be obstructed by higher risk of plagiarism?
• Do you think that e-supervision could be obstructed by requirements of original/unpublished work now undisclosed by e-supervision itself?
• Do you think that e-supervision can put any especial concern on intellectual property rights, privacy, or other rights related to authors or works in general?

Concluding Session

Hilligje van’t Land, Director, Membership and Programme Development, IAU

How can e-supervision be implemented?

Let’s start with the basics and see how we can move on.

Let’s think about how to do the research, how to change the mindset of doing research, about networking, about the internationalization of the process.

What measures should be taken?

Leadership truly is key to the whole process of implementing e-supervision.

What are the incentives?

Is money the right incentive? does it scale? is it sustainable?

Universities could share their initiatives and experiences at http://www.idea-phd.net/

A very important issue is to create a community. A community within the team, the department, the university, across universities… a sense of community of e-supervisors and people interested or working on e-supervision.

Olive Mugenda, Vice-Chancellor, Kenyatta University (KU), Kenya

We need a framework to guide universities through e-supervision.

One of the major concerns is quality. Maintaining a standard of quality.

Related to quality, there’s monitoring, to guarantee that the whole process is working smoothly.

What modalities are there? What methodologies?

How frequently people should communicate, when, how… some guidelines that are just illustrative, but that can provide a framework that everybody understands and agrees upon.

What is the balance between traditional supervision and e-supervision?

Josep M. Vilalta, Executive Secretary, Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP)

A need indeed for a framework and guidelines to effectively implement e-supervision.

e-Supervision does not necessarily have to be 100% online, but can also explore a blended or hybrid approach, where traditional and e-supervision models can complement each other, as it is already happening at the undergraduate and master levels.

e-Supervision can also be very interesting in “industrial doctorates”, which consist in enterprise-university agreements to develop research that can lead towards the completion of a PhD.

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