Model for Blended Supervision of Post-Graduate Students

Abstract

Supervision of eLearning students at Maseno University poses a great challenge to the normal institutional order because most senior lecturers qualified for postgraduate supervision are technologically illiterate, semi-literate, or challenged [10]. The recommended lecturer to student ratio for postgraduate supervision in Maseno University is 1: 5 and 1: 3 for master’s and PhD students, respectively, but the actual ratio is 1: 12 [23]. The challenge of high student numbers in three different campuses, low numbers of qualified supervisors; and fully online students is a big problem. ELearning is not new to the developed world but a fairly new concept in Africa [2, 6, 7]. Through eLearning, Maseno is fulfilling the global demand for universal lifelong learning [26]. Introducing blended supervision was a strategy seeking to harness the opportunities in the online platform by reducing distance between students while increasing the rate and quality of feedback [8, 21, 31]; leveraging the affordances of virtual learning to create an interactive environment for learners and faculty [11, 18, 15]. Objectives of this project were to develop policy and procedures for online supervision, Identify postgraduate supervision milestones, and Build a collaborative research environment. The study used the critical case study design [28] and was hinged on constructivist theory [15]. The population consisted of 513 students, 42 lecturers from the 5 schools with postgraduate courses at eCampus, and 8 university administrators. Purposive sampling led to 149 students, 11 lecturers, and 3 administrators from one school that fully embraced the model. Data were collected using online …