Scalable mentoring
Supervisors struggle to cope with the increasing
number of student research projects.
Well-done student research supervision takes much time and effort. Given the increasingly numerous other commitments, most of today’s academics can only be described as time-poor. Nevertheless, the number of students increase. While the lecture hall scaled comparatively well, one-on-one guidance through a research project requires resources that are getting scarcer by the semester.
In the context of The Student’s Research Companion, we have explored opportunities in the initial steps of a digital thesis companion and supervision scaling project: Research Stride. In this project, we conceptually explored different functions that might help both students and supervisors to efficiently customize the research experience and make the supervision experience more manageable. Central features are, e.g., a project management cockpit for supervisors, a self-service mentoring environment for students, and digitized processes to set up, maintain, and complete projects. All features of Research Stride aim at reducing those frictions in the research and supervision process that stem from administrative overhead, lack of transparency, and media discontinuities that are not useful in the process of experiencing, training, or examining research.
To scale academic mentoring, there is no path around its sensible and partial digitization. This will free up resources needed for students and projects that truly need full attention.
In essence, digitally scaling the academic mentoring experience requires enabling supervisors to efficiently steer more projects while enabling students to self-service with reliable guidance that does not have to be repeated individually, in each case. Of course, this entails an increased transparency of the interaction – a change that many supervisors may find uncomfortable. Moreover, scaling requires centralization in the form of a centralized software system – a change that may feel foreign to traditionally decentralized universities. Finally, the intense digitalization drive of the past years has left university IT departments overloaded with projects large and small, IT infrastructure often outsourced to large, inflexible, proprietary, and increasingly costly IT corporations which makes implementing more nimble solutions difficult to impossible. For now, it appears that supervisors can only be encouraged to build their own academic mentoring solutions until solutions like Research Stride come to market.
What are techniques to manage and support the ever-increasing number of students in their research projects? What, in terms of supervision duties, can be optimized more easily? Which part of academic mentoring seems stubbornly difficult to increase in efficiency?