Abstract:

Postgraduate research programs represent a substantial investment by universities around the world, as well as by the students who pay to participate in these programs. The supervisor-student relationship is a foundational element of these investments. While there has been a growing body of academic research over the past two decades on the qualities of effective graduate supervision, the issue continues to be a comparatively recent and relatively underdeveloped field of study. More specifically, there is very little research on the limits and possibilities of effective supervision in the context of the growing digital culture of the present day. I argue that many of the problems that potentially challenge the quality of graduate supervision today are no different from the problems of the past. However, there are also new challenges and issues for effective supervison that arise from the highly visual, mobile, accelerated, and strongly populist character of cultural life in an era of cellphones, laptops and the internet. This paper contributes to current research by offering 6 key principles of effective graduate supervision, in the 'digital age,' drawn both from a review of academic literature, and my own experience as supervisor of more than 40 successful research theses and doctoral dissertations over the past 35 years.