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• Do you think that e-supervision could be obstructed by requirements of original/unpublished work now undisclosed by e-supervision itself?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.

Olive Mugenda, Vice-Chancellor, Kenyatta University (KU), Kenya
e-Supervision to support the development of doctoral studies in Africa

Ensure that quality of training programmes is everywhere.

Doctoral students are often already employed at the university.

Most phds in Africa are employed at the university. It is not usual to find phds that are not at the university.

Age average of phd students is 30-50, very different from other places.

Challenges of doctoral education in Africa:

• Shortage of phds in universities: growth of academic staff has not matched the growth of enrolment, low levels of research in some disciplines.
• Quality of phds: quality of institution depends on the quality of the academic staff, and the quality of doctoral students depends on the quality of the supervision.
• Low completion rates: part of it due to lack of or bad supervision.
• Lack of international exposure of faculty: lots of inbreeding too. Quality of faculty is, to a large extent, dependent on the international exposure acquired in graduate & postdoctoral education.

Factors the impact the quality of PhDs:

• Lack of institutional and programme policies: organization, incentives, discipline expectations, a clear supervision policy with detailed responsibilities, etc.
• Supervision itself, that requires support and challenges.
• Massification of higher education, high number of people globally.

e-supervision

• To complement internal supervision and support.
• For supervision to be more effective.
• Connecting the supervisor and the student regardless of space.
• Intensive use of ICTs.
• Also in the thesis defence.

Advantages:

• Use the services of renowned experts.
• Increase the quality and improve the experience.
• Productive and effective way to manage and supervise students.
• Strengthen local research capacity and regional networking, holistic and inclusive approach, active involvement of institutions… and students themselves.
• To extend research and employment opportunities into remote, rural and hard-to-fill locations.
• Access to desirable research internships.
• Minimize supervisors’ travel time.

Challenges

• Lack of a well defined e-supervision professional code of conduct.
• Poor e-supervisor and e-supervisee technological knowhow, access to technological infrastructures.
• e-Supervision is costly.

Recommendations

• Develop an e-supervision framework.
• Define the role for e-supervisors, and the student and supervisor e-relationship.
• Assurance of quality.
• Remuneration of e-supervisors.
• Institutional collaboration on e-supervision.
• Recognition of e-supervisor work by home and beneficiary institutions.
• Capacity building for e-supervision.

Discussion

Miquel Duran: how many time can the doctoral students allocate to their PhDs, especially the ones that “need” the PhD? Mugenda: lecturers normally have time allocated for that.

Chrissie Boughey: how do we transpose the different models of supervision of the different disciplines into e-supervision? Mugenda: regarding research methods, it is a matter of finding what is actually different and what is common. And then centralize what is common and distribute or adapt what is really different.

Hilligje van’t Land: if the e-supervisor is not from the university, how does it fit with local relevance, and with local content? Will the strategy be in line with the university’s strategy? Mugenda: this is a minor problem in comparison with the amount of students that want to do a PhD and not be able to do it. And it is also a matter of binding the e-supervisor with the university.

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

There is a dire need for real phds, in Africa or elsewhere, virtual or not.

There also is a need to collaborate, to innovate in the field of how to foster brand new research and how to support the new research done by PhD students.

Added to that, there is a need for research networks: it is important to note that supervision is also part of being a network.

A very important challenge is how to provide technical support, how to bring into research ethical dimensions, or how to lead the administrative changes that have to accompany the changes in research and in supervision.

But most important of all, beyond theories, we have to see how to put e-supervision into practice, to make it happen.

Marta Aymerich, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

One of the keys of research and PhD is supervision. It is not a trivial matter and thus needs being addressed properly.

ICTs have provided very powerful in knowledge related tasks. We thus need to leverage the power of ICTs in research in general and in supervision in particular.

We need to discuss the structures in place for doctoral education.

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

There is a dire need for research and for PhDs.

We especially need to train the trainers, people that will earn their own PhDs so that they can supervise/train others.

The whole process needs to be accountable, in general terms of performance, but especially in terms of ensuring quality.

We can’t keep the old model of supervision, we have to open up supervision.

We have to change paradigm, get out of old way of thinking and foster e-supervision.

Jaume Casals, Vice-Chancellor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in representation of the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP)

PhDs are the jewel of the crown, thus we have to harvest them with care.