Ken Larsson from the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University presented a paper entitled, The

challenge for supervision: Mass individualisation of the thesis writing process with

less resources, at Online Educa Berlin 2011. In this presentation, he briefly introduced a system that they
developed, Sci Pro (Scientific process and outcomes).

I believe their system could add value to the postgraduate supervision process in CEMS, based on the following.

The developers of SciPro believe that universities need to renew and transform their way of organising education in order to be more suitable for today's youth and their digital lifestyle. The vision, Education for
all, further requires radically new teaching methods in order to enable fair opportunities for larger numbers of students. In light of the large number students admitted, many may not be suitably qualified, and require more teaching and supervision time. University staff consequently faces increasing teaching loads and more students to supervise. They further believe that some of the challenges for higher education such as a high non-

completion rate of postgraduate studies can be addressed by a conceptual framework that they developed, which is implemented by means of an Information technology (IT)-support system for theses at universities worldwide.
The developers point of departure is that the core of university activities is to educate students to understand and apply scientific methods and theories. This manifests itself primarily in independent projects at various degree levels ranging from bachelor to doctoral level. In light of this, they focused on the creation of a scalable and modular IT system that motivates and supports students and supervisors in the scientific process that leads to a finished thesis.

Open Rubric

Integration between each universitys other existing IT systems. Users should experience it as one system, not as a lot of fragmented and isolated "islands". This means both inter-operability between administrative systems such as, for instance student registration and grade reporting, as well as individualised transition between different courses, coherent administration, degrees and working. Furthermore, one should be able to move smoothly through integrated solutions between the IT systems that young people use today in their daily lives such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and the universitys IT infrastructure. Learning occurs in both formal and informal settings and thresholds should be as low as possible.

No IT initiatives will be accepted by researchers, teachers or administrators or decision makers in an academic organisation, if they take more time. When IT support however, can enhance and refine existing processes and save time, they may be interested. Meta-supervision support means that a comprehensive guidance is provided by IT resources, so that the supervisor does not need to say the same thing over and over again to new or more students regarding basic requirements for the degree project, methodological approach, content and structure. This information is conveyed through dynamic checklists for different phases of the research process, quality selection of e-resources, interactive videos and more.

How research can be conducted and what the process might look like may be exemplified in a much more engaging way for students. To accomplish this, the developers use narrative techniques from cinema as well as innovative technologies, which mainly take the form of hyper video presentations. Different video layers are related to other resources such as videos, texts, and web pages in a mind map-like fashion. These video overviews reduce supervisors need to repeat core content and provide self-study opportunities for students. Embedded in the videos are activating tasks and assignments linked to reward systems inspired by computer games such as meta-rewards.

The process is reinforced by, among other things: a) "State of Mind - indicator", the student indicates if he/she needs support in real time, b) a online peer review system that organises large numbers of students, so that they can receive and give feedback on each other's manuscripts in various stages based on prepared checklists. This changes the problem of supervising many students from a time-consuming disadvantage into a timesaving and quality improvement resource. The peer-review system is completely student driven, thus it will not take supervisors time to arrange peer-reviews. However, supervisors can access reviews and assess their quality if they want.

Completed mandatory milestones are visualised with automatic progress indicators showing how much has been done and are left to do in order to complete the thesis. Many students have difficulties structuring their time when left without a schedule, therefore the feature Activity plan is part of the system in order to help structure timeplanning. Both the supervisor and the student can see the activities planned, and reminders are sent before milestones and if the student is after his/her plan. Many theses are not completed within the allotted time frame and many are not completed at all because of unclear requirements and schedules.

The system makes possible supervisor teams with external supervisors from the business and public sectors. External agents can provide ideas for theses that are relevant to industry through the Idea bank. Theses may be completed at the company or abroad and supervised by distance technology through the integrated system with several different types of supervisors who have different responsibilities and roles.

In addition to research methodology and subject knowledge, a thesis needs to contain a new dimension: a new question and/or new interpretation of data, and/or a new service, process or product. The system structures relevant methodological content, but also provides support for creativity. Some students need creativity support more than others, while others have greater need for help to structure their creativity with the methodological skills. The system intends to support both student profiles. An integrated anti-plagiarism system makes it easier for teachers to control textual originality and even plagiarized images, tables and program code. To control and curb cheating in higher education has become more time consuming and extensive in recent years. Advanced integrated support for this that goes beyond text matching system really enhances quality assurance. 4

Figure 1 illustrates the benefits of the SciPro system for different stakeholders. The primary target group are the two individuals; supervisor and student. The supervisor benefits by saving approximately 50% of time previously devoted to administration and basic requirements, instructions and low level feedback. The student gains approximately 100 extra supervisor hours by the features built in the system, which enables self-regulated and focused learning and activities necessary to accomplish the thesis. From an organisational point of view the main benefactors are higher education institutions and business sectors. The system enables larger student numbers within existing resources.

It appears as if we would be able to adopt some of the contents of this system for our own purposes, for instance, by investigating how it can address the list of targets identified in Table 1 in our environment. The developers have only recently begun collaborating with other universities (the University of Finland). We could add value by being the first South African (African) to adopt the system and investigating its relevance in an ODL environment and synergies in this type of context. 8