Undergraduate Research

Voelkel, S., Mello, L. V., & Varga-Atkins, T. (2018). Supporting students during their undergraduate research projects using audio recordings. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 55(4), 433-440.

"Undergraduate final year research projects are part of many degree programmes and help students enhance a variety of transferable skills. A challenge for supervisors is encouraging students to develop as independent learners, while simultaneously providing support and structure for a successful, timely completion. In this project, we trialled a student-centred supervision approach where all supervisory meetings were concluded by producing audio recordings of students summarising the discussion. The recordings were emailed to the students who were instructed to write and return a short reflection to the supervisor. Students found that the audio summaries ensured that they stayed engaged and focused during the meetings. The recordings helped them understand and remember the issues discussed and encouraged them to take ownership of their project. Willingness and ability to reflect, however, were patchy, indicating that students may need more training in the skills of reflection earlier on in their studies."

dos Santos, H. L., & Cechinel, C. (2019). The final year project supervision in online distance learning: assessing students and faculty perceptions about communication tools. Behaviour & Information Technology, 38(1), 65-84.

"Communication in Online Distance Learning courses revolves around two distinct forms: synchronous and asynchronous. A lot of work has been already developed focused on better understanding the roles that each of these forms of communication plays in Distance Learning and to which extent they are sufficient to provide rich and in-depth interaction experience for students and professors. The present paper focuses on better understanding the perceptions of Online Distance Learning students and supervisors about communication tools available for them during the Final Year Project supervision (FYP). A total of 262 students and 62 professors were surveyed about their impressions related to three different aspects of communication during FYP distance supervision: preferences for one form of communication over the other (synchronous versus asynchronous), appropriateness of both forms of communication to different types of discussions, and the sufficiency of these forms of communication as the sole forms of communication in the FYP discipline. Among other things, results point out an explicit preference from students and supervisors for using the asynchronous form throughout the discipline (even though the synchronous form also received good ratings). Moreover, both forms of communication were more used by students and supervisors for the discussion of academic and important topics. At last, both students and supervisors consider distance supervision as efficient as face-to-face supervision, and less experienced students consider more important to have face-to-face meetings with their supervisors than more experienced students."