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…

Academics without PhDs are common in developing countries and among lecturers from marginalised communities, yet the literature on doctoral education largely ignores them. This qualitative study aimed to address that gap by interviewing academics without PhDs in South Africa and Australia. Their narratives of betwixt and betweenness contribute to…

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…

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.…

The challenges involving doctoral non-completion and a lack of academic or scholarly quality are not restricted to putting the blame on doctoral candidates themselves, their supervisors or the institutions where they enrol. As candidates carry huge responsibilities when entering doctoral studies, success can be associated with an array of factors…

This paper looks into the importance of a responsible research community and how ethics can contribute towards the building of such a community. The paper starts off by outlining the many challenges facing a responsible research community. These challenges range from doing research, transferring the research results, commercialising the…

Supervision might be understood as the provision usually by an academic to a student of either the expert guidance in subject knowledge or genre knowledge in relation to postgraduate thesis development. The Project for Postgraduate Educational Research (PPER) team members, in the course of their field visits, sought to interview supervisors of…

Postgraduate supervision does not only require academic and research skills from the supervisors--they may also assume a variety of roles to support the postgraduate student from novice to experienced researcher. The role of supervisors in the supervisory process, as well as the views of a purposeful selection of lecturers on the role is the focus…

Students within academic research projects usually assume a role of supporting the academics/scholars who are undertaking those research projects. The students' identity in this case is regarded as research assistants, with minimal valued input to the project itself. With time, however, this identity may change based on the roles and relationships…

An inadequate number of suitably qualified and experienced supervisors, an increase in the number of students, uncertainty regarding the suitability of supervision and academic rigour in dissertations and theses make it difficult to produce quality graduates within the prescribed time-frame as stipulated by the Department of Education. By…

Service learning as a strategy for raising awareness amongst university students of their responsibilities to the community is rapidly gaining currency in higher education institutions in South Africa. High levels of unemployment and striking economic inequality have been an unfortunate feature of South African society for several decades. Since…