Abstract:

According to the studies done in Nordic universities (Finland and Sweden), the challenges of an undigitalized thesis management process can be divided coordination specific, supervision specific and thesis writing specific challenges. Based on the previous studies, the coordination challenges primarily concern poor situational visibility: management and coordinators are not able to see if theses are progressing or not, and which of them have problems. In addition, it is typical that coordinators are not able to follow the situation of supervisors either: what is the real workload of each supervisor, are there any students lagging from earlier semesters, who can take more students to supervise, how actively supervisors supervise the thesis. Supervision challenges in turn concerns mostly on the communication with students; how to keep track of situation of all different students and the status of their thesis project, what is agreed with each student, what are the latest activities. Thesis writing challenges concerns mostly on organizing the thesis writing project and communication with their supervisor. If no centralized system is used, the communication is done using several media: emails, phone calls, LMSs, and by instant messaging services. Later it is very difficult to track which media was used and where the latest communication is possible to find.

Thesis management process digitalization is one way to solve these known challenges. However, as thesis management is knowledge work conducted by experts, its digitalization is not so straightforward than more mechanical work. To support this kind of expert oriented digitalization, an EXOD (expert oriented digitalization) model was developed and based on it, a thesis management process was digitalized in one Finnish university of applied sciences (UAS). During that digitalization, an information system (Wihi) was developed and implemented to support the process.

In this study, we are applying a tool-based approach for thesis management process digitalization in Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ). The hypothesis is that good practices developed during the thesis process digitalization in Finnish UAS can be transferred to new university in new culture with the help of an already developed information system (Wihi). However, the first step of the research is to study if we are solving the right problems, i.e., if the challenges of the GIJ thesis management process are similar to the found in the Nordic universities.

To find out the main challenges of the thesis management process in GIJ, and the main differences between the challenges in Ghana and Nordic universities, we conducted interviews with thesis coordinators and supervisors in GIJ in the fall 2022. In this research, we focused on an organization point of view, i.e. how university staff sees the situation, because their buy-in is vital for the success of thesis management process digitalization: it must solve their problems. Also, the student point of view is important, the tool should help their work as well, and it will be interesting to see in future studies if students’ challenges differ in different countries.

Based on the results, the challenges of undigitalized thesis management processes are quite similar in GIJ and in Nordic countries and based on that the utilization of the good practices developed in earlier thesis management process digitalization in the Finnish UAS is a meaningful approach to proceed in GIJ.

Keywords:

Non-digitalized thesis process, thesis process challenges, education digitalization, thesis management.