Doctoral supervision is a complex endeavour that plays a critical role in the doctoral journey, which can be a lonely and challenging process for doctoral candidates. Although doctoral supervision has previously been practiced at a distance or virtually in doctoral programmes that were offered online or included online components (Kumar & Johnson, 2019), the COVID-19 pandemic led to a transition to various forms of remote doctoral supervision across the world. Supervisors and postgraduates suddenly needed to adapt their earlier practices and collaborations on research projects to the online environment. ‘Emergency remote teaching’ (Hodges et al., 2020) was the term used for the sudden pivot from face-to-face to remote teaching and learning that differed from online education that was purposefully planned and where teachers and learners had chosen the online medium. This emergency pivot to remote doctoral supervision involved the adoption of new technologies and strategies, innovation and experimentation and persistence during challenging and isolating circumstances on the part of supervisors and doctoral learners. Limited access to support, infrastructure (e.g. technology or bandwidth), a steep learning curve, and changes in daily life (e.g. loss of social interactions and work from home) influenced the supervision process. Nevertheless, supervisors and doctoral learners have demonstrated creativity, innovation, sensitivity, and resilience to forge models, strategies, and practices that work for their needs, affordances, and contexts. For this special issue, we focus on doctoral student and supervisor research and experience-led responses to learning and teaching needs, when all or most of our work has gone online, operating remotely. We have a particular concern for how doctoral learners and their communities, supervisors, examiners, and the educational development support for these have responded to the challenges and affordances of working remotely during the pandemic of 2020–21. It seems likely that the best of the effective development to deal with a crisis might well be here to stay, and so will transform practice to enable, support and develop doctoral learners, supervisors and examiners (QAA, 2021). This special issue includes papers about the strategies, practices, benefits, and challenges of online/remote/virtual supervision from researchers in diverse contexts in Australia, Canada, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, the Philippines, the UK, and the USA.
The issue opens with an analysis of the challenges and affordances of remote doctoral supervision by Wisker, Lofstrom and colleagues from various countries. This discussion is grounded in a new supervision framework, adapted for online supervision by colleagues in IDERN, the international doctoral education network, from an earlier doctoral learning journeys framework (Wisker, Morris et al., 2011). Writing development during remote supervision is discussed next by Guerin and Aitchison from Australia, who review existing literature on best practices in developing doctoral writing at a distance, pedagogical activities, and digital feedback. The third and fourth articles in this special issue deal with strategies for doctoral supervision in online and blended doctoral programmes where supervisors and doctoral candidates build supervisory relationships and work towards dissertation or thesis completion virtually. Jacobsen, Friesen and Becker conducted interviews with five supervisors and five doctoral graduates in a blended doctoral programme in Canada to explore strategies, enabling factors, and challenges when fostering effective supervisory relationships online. Strategies and challenges of online research group supervision were explored by Kumar and colleagues based in the USA, who interviewed 10 graduates of an online doctoral programme to conclude that structure, support, and community contribute to research development and progress.
Torka examined the use of video-conferencing technology to replace face-to-face supervision in physics and the social sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic. He analysed multiple interviews and Zoom recordings from the US and Australia to understand supervisor and doctoral candidate interactions in the online environment. The perspectives and differing experiences of resistance and adoption of two doctoral supervisors during the transition to remote supervision are described next by Palmer and Gillaspy from the UK. Bendrups, Candelaria and Hogan from Australia and the Philippines focus on the experiences of doctoral candidates in a transnational research training partnership during this transition and highlight the importance of relationships and the treatment of candidates to their progress, well-being, and sense of belonging. The importance of connections and building community is further emphasised by Elliot and Makara, also from the UK, who use an autoethnographic approach in their study about the online supervision of a group of international scholars and discuss the psychological benefits of online supervision. This is termed ‘a blessing in disguise’ in the article that follows about the experiences of Indonesian doctoral students in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing directly on the doctoral student experience, Amelia and colleagues use positioning theory to explore one participant’s cross-cultural experience and the support she received.
The COVID-19 pandemic also led to transitions to remote teaching and learning in supervisor development. The two final articles in this special issue from the UK and Ireland, respectively, focus on how supervisor development programmes transitioned to the online environment. Vaughan, Blackburn, and Curzon describe the experiences of participants in an online community of practice for supervisors, the challenges faced, and the need for structured facilitation online. Roisin Donnelly and Yurgos Politis turn their focus to supporting supervisors in their supervision of undergraduate research. They report on delivering a redesigned module as part of an accredited professional development (PD) masters programme, offering online practices and approaches sought by UG supervisors and propose an experiential and reflective contribution by educational developers in supporting the PD of UG supervisors.
The articles here explore problems and share good practice, and they also show effective ways of overcoming the sudden and ongoing difficulties of engaging with and producing sensitive, rigorous and ethical research. We have all had to adapt our practice and research methods because of experiencing the constraints, challenges and some affordances of the sudden crisis and ongoing remote, online work (see Helen Kara & Su-Ming Khoo, 2020). None of what you read here was able to be based on several years of solid trials or swathes of longitudinal data. The experience and new developments explored in this and a future issue derive from imaginative, professional problem-solving, based on transferring and changing effective practice from more traditional contexts to deal with new contexts and demands, developing new practices. Based in historically sound, tried, tested and now rapidly, newly adapted forms, the research methods offer examples of agile responses, creative research at the very edge of new creative thinking and development. Importantly, the articles here, based in this agile practice and research, also offer effective practices for remote, online supervision.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).