Online supervision: a theory of supervisors’ strategic communicative influence on student dissertations

Abstract

Online supervision mainly focuses on written communication and electronic drafts, while offline supervision comprises physical and social clues, verbal communication, and drafts of texts. This article focuses on supervisors' written online communication about drafts of undergraduate student dissertations. Theoretically, these utterances form part of the communicative exchanges performed in the practice of supervision. This means that supervision is an emergent phenomenon that relates to its past, current, and future states. The setting was a dissertation course within a bachelor programme in behavioural science. The data consists of 423 utterances from four supervisors. The utterances were analysed and categorised, and the results show different qualities and degrees of identifications in the supervisors' communicated utterances. The study shows that the quality of supervisors' utterances embraces the difference between the application of comments, points of view, instructions, and questions. This implicates the importance of supervisors' awareness of the nature and the combination of their utterances if they want to increase the student autonomy when supervising online. Keywords Communication Á Dissertation Á Online learning Á Supervision Á Written utterances Supervision as a communicative practice Supervision is a relevant teaching practice for almost every student and teacher who participates in higher education. This practice includes supervisory meetings between students and teachers. During these meetings, students and teachers discuss drafts of the

Encouraging student independence

“…That questions comprise a significant part of supervision of degree projects, was evident in the focus group interviews done with supervisors, where this was discussed for instance in relation to a Socratic supervisory ideal (Focus groups 20161004, 20160929, 20161104). There were also in the recorded supervision meetings ample examples of how questions may serve several different purposes in the interaction between student and supervisor, which is in line with previous research on the field (eg Augustsson & Jaldemark, 2014;Eriksson & Gustavsson, 2016). 4 At the beginning of the supervision process, questions from the supervisor could for instance often address what the student was planning to do next, while questions from the student often concerned how things could or should be done.…”

“…3 The material has been analyzed through qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2012), with a focus on two of the potential scaffolding means mentioned by van de Pol et al: asking questions and giving instructions (van de Pol et al, 2010:276f). These are aspects which, according to research on the field, are central in supervision of degree projects (cf Augustsson & Jaldemark, 2014;Eriksson & Gustavsson, 2016;Light et al, 2009). The role of questions and instructions within supervision of degree projects was also frequently discussed in the focus group interviews done with supervisors within the research project.…”

“…Finally, there are studies which look at the role of asking questions and giving instructions in supervision of degree projects, like Augustsson and Jaldemark (2014) and Eriksson and Gustavsson (2016). These are also of relevance for this article, even though they do not discuss independent learning or scaffolding as such.…”

A Systematic Review of Project Allocation Methods in Undergraduate Transnational Engineering Education

“…These challenges could be resolved through the use of technology where, for example, the staff are recommended to integrate the contemporary communication tools like Skype, WhatsApp, WeChat (a popular connectivity tool in China), etc., in their day-to-day communication with students to provide a healthy supervision experience to the students. However, Augustsson and Jaldermark note that online supervision requires a different skill set, as online supervision relies mainly on written communication around electronic drafts [56].…”

Working independently on the dissertation proposal: experiences of international Master’s students

“…A dialogic approach, where supervisors do not simply give feedback on completed drafts but also discuss the work in progress, is particularly effective (Vehviläinen and Löfström 2016). Through this interaction with a more experienced researcher, students can progress on to work that they would be unable to complete independently (Augustsson and Jaldemark 2014).…”