The resources developed by DocEnhance to enhance doctoral supervision will be presented by Dr Alberto Lázaro, Dr Alfredo Gardel and Dr Ignacio Bravo from University of Alcalá, Spain at the 5th International Conference on the Development of Doctoral Education, 6. April 2022.
What Covid Has Left Behind: Developing New Blended Learning Models in Doctoral Supervision
Doctoral supervision has been hampered in numerous ways over the last two years due to social distancing and lockdowns caused by the Covid pandemic. During this period, the European funded DocEnhance project has provided a set of broad guidelines and resources to set up courses aimed at enhancing doctoral supervision, which are being piloted at several partner universities. In this paper, we look at how the University of Alcala, a mid-sized higher education institution in Spain, has addressed the challenges of this new situation in its doctoral supervision courses and the whole doctoral process. Assuming optimistically that the Covid pandemic comes to an end soon, several strategies, actions and recommendations will remain in place within the Doctoral School procedures; therefore, it is important to carefully analyse the new learning models introduced, outlining the advantages and disadvantages of online and face-to-face courses on doctoral supervision, for both senior and junior supervisors, as well as other practices in our doctoral programmes. The implementation of some pilot courses on supervision will be discussed, together with some new protocols introduced for supervisors, who need some training to manage a set of digital tools, an online data repository, project planning, video conferencing, and other features that the new future blended learning models in doctoral supervision require.