An alternative supervision model for postgraduate projects: A course-specific approach

Most postgraduate students are required to undertake an individual project under the guidance of an academic supervisor. The increasing population of postgraduate students ([1]) introduces challenges under traditional supervision models (i.e. one topic and one supervisor per student), e.g. managing supervisors’ workload, topic allocation by student preference, and inconsistencies within cohorts. Departments/Schools face similar challenges as they introduce new courses to meet educational and market needs. This paper discusses the introduction of an alternative supervision model. On a per-course basis, this model relies on: i) small supervision teams, and ii) fewer high-level topics (i.e. instead of one detailed topic per student). Both are proportional to the cohort size to ensure the scalability of the model is maintained with increasing student numbers. The paper concludes with the results of a preliminary study on the application of the model to one postgraduate course at a UK Computer Science Department.