How are supervisors and candidates affected?
There are three major perspectives:
• Personal perspective: Communications, wellbeing, context, disruptions, and collegiality is affected
• Learning perspective: It affects the workflow
• Institutional: It affects the structure of timings technology and accessibility bandwidth
Strategies and Practices
1. Connecting: Supervisors need to establish a convenient standard time across time zones that work for both supervisor and doctoral candidate while also identify a standard mode of communication. Defining a common communication method for an online meeting that both candidate and supervisor are comfortable with is essential. Even coming up with a technique that considers both can access technology for easier communication.
2. Communicating: The supervisor should initiate and direct online communication for the first few months of the online supervisory relationship. Once the doctoral candidates get more comfortable with the research process and supervision, gradually transfer the responsibilities for communication to the candidates. Choose and use technologies depending on the meeting's goals, like discussing data analysis that requires access to technology at that time. The frequency of online meetings impacts both candidate progress as well as satisfaction in online supervision.
3. Building a Supervisors Relationship: It is not always feasible for supervisors to embark on a supervisory relationship in the online environment. The online presence greatly influences supervisors' chances of building a supportive relationship to how they are perceived to be available and present for the candidates. During the availability of time and presence, the supervisor should also express their personality during formal online communication (regardless of being geographically at a distance).
4. Understanding Expectations: Doctoral candidates must introduce the university, its policies, processes, and other resources needed for research to accomplish their goals. Institutions or departments can provide pre-scheduled or even pre-recorded online orientations to doctoral program policies, requirements, and online resources accessible at the institution for candidates, for instance, access to technologies, online tutorials, and access to research software. Several supervisors can also use these to reduce the time and efforts exhausted by individual online supervisors. Institutions need to formalize among candidates through an agreement or learning contract. Supervisors need to define milestones for the research project and regularly review progress towards them at the same time, setting deadlines for sharing drafts and giving feedback.
5. Designing and Implementing: From design to the implementation of research for a thesis, the entire process is a multifaceted and challenging endeavor for most doctoral candidates in any situation. In an online case, supervisors are often challenged with candidates who have not in the past conducted research and might not even have access to resources available compared to an on-campus candidate. In the absence of research training, supervisors need to find available online resources or maybe engage candidates in research projects that can acquire the required skills, like observe and learn about research processes and methods.
6. Producing Writing: In most cases, candidates have inadequate experience in writing lengthy pieces of work. It can help supervisors start small by asking for brief details like article reviews and then continuing with more long-winded texts. Additionally, many institutions have academic writing and support centers so that supervisors can guide candidates in their direction. Time and again, online candidates have multiple demands and stress from family and employment commitments; in such a situation is challenging to find time to write. Supervisors can assist candidates by conversing about writing strategies, like bingeing on writing, snacking in between other activities when time is suitable. Supervisors can introduce a buddy system among candidates to get familiar with the entire writing process.
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