Postgraduate education has grown enormously worldwide, which has led to supervisors being expected to take on a supervisor's role immediately upon graduation. But crossing the border from being a doctoral candidate to becoming a doctoral supervisor entails significant shifts in identity and an understanding of postgraduate pedagogy and…

Doctoral education and supervision have changed in recent decades. The increasing prevalence of co-supervision has been a notable aspect of this, but change also includes stricter accountability and quality assurance measures, such as the quantification of workload allocations in supervision as well as of academic work more broadly. This paper…

Given South Africa's colonial and apartheid past, postgraduate supervisors are encouraged to explore decolonial and socially just ways of supervision. I draw on Freire's adult education theory and Hackman's tools of social justice education to reflect on transformative supervision workshops held at a South African university School of Public…

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the implementation of online assessments at an unprecedented pace. The pandemic required most higher education institutions worldwide to implement online assessments almost overnight. The study aimed to gain an understanding of auditing students' perceptions of online assessments and e-proctoring systems during…

This paper presents an autoethnographic, narrative analysis through self-reflection of my own personal transition from doctoral student to doctoral supervisor. An evaluation of the importance of the PhD in South Africa, the role of doctoral supervisors, and characteristics of good supervisors was undertaken; against which my personal experience…

This part-reflective, part-conceptual article focuses on the issue of supervision models and the need to move away from the dominance of the traditional master-apprentice model which continues to persist in many social sciences and humanities contexts. Drawing on communities of practice theory, I critically reflect on my own PhD supervision…

This study reports on the experiences students registered for a first-year, undergraduate English Studies module and English Studies lecturers had with the Invigilator app during an online examination in the first semester of 2023. Current research indicates that e-proctoring induces anxiety and uncertainty in students when they write online…

The purpose of this study was to examine variation in doctoral students' experiences of ethics in doctoral supervision and how these experiences are related to research engagement, burnout, satisfaction, and intending to discontinue PhD studies. Data were collected from 860 doctoral students in Finland, Estonia, and South Africa. Four distinct…

The report of the Ministerial Committee on Transformation and Social Cohesion revealed that exclusionary practices are commonplace in South African universities. They remain a compelling factor that contributes to student attrition in Master's and doctoral programmes, and they were a trigger to the #RhodesMustFall movement. Universities, oblivious…

This paper presents an evocative autoethnographic account of my postgraduate supervision experience in two African institutions while dealing mainly with students in the computing disciplines of Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Technology. In this paper, the context of the postgraduate supervision, and the lessons learnt are…

South African universities have evidenced exponential increases in the numbers of doctoral students, bringing pressure to bear upon traditional supervisory practice. With the literature on the challenges experienced by international postgraduate students at South African universities being very limited, it was anticipated that the challenges…

Supervisory practices are fundamental to the production of research in higher education, but these practices are undertheorized and poorly understood. Academia needs to understand and engage with supervisory pedagogies to reinforce their importance in knowledge production and the development of a knowledge society. Using content analysis of…

Open Distance e-Learning (ODeL) is on the rise to cater to non-traditional students. However, the surge in master's and doctoral students opting for ODeL raises concerns about the quality and timely completion of degrees. Existing literature on student attrition in higher education indicates that both student-related factors and institutional…

The pace of global transformation places a great emphasis on the need for development, with higher education identified as a key agent in the development of a knowledge economy. Higher education systems have been challenged with providing the necessary skilled person-power to complement the changing labour market. Postgraduate supervision is a…

Institutional research management (RM) is increasingly seen as a strategic force, not only to raise the research output per academic, but also the quality thereof. RM, therefore, has to attend to researcher development (RD). How RD is achieved, as part of RM, is still viewed as an embryonic field with attendant calls for additional research.…