Creating Postgraduate Collaborations Forums CPC Supervision Development Course Module 1 Module 1, Session 4: Key national and institutional documents

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 83 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • CPC Admin
    Keymaster
    Post count: 80

    What are the key national and institutional documents that guide your standards and processes around postgraduate education?

    Post a message here, listing these documents and sharing key quotes from them.

    If you have access to particular national requirements or institutional policies, please share these on the forum too. Then see if you can use those documents to answer any of the questions.

    Remember to  click “subscribe” (top right corner) to receive responses to your comments via email.

    Christopher Odhiambo
    Moderator
    Post count: 15

    1. Universities Act
    2. Universities Charter
    3. University’s Statues (Masters Degrees: A candidate maybe conferred with a Masters degree in any School or Institute, provided that he is registered for the degree as a student of the University as specified in the Regulations, pursues such advanced study or research or both as may be approved by Senate; Doctorate Degrees : A candidate shall he conferred with a Doctorate degree in a School or Institute of the university provided that he or she has been registered for the degree as a student of the University as specified in the Regulations for Admission and has pursued such advanced study or research or both as may be approved by Senate).
    4. Commission for University Education: Universities Standards and Guidelines: (postgraduate programmes a) A postgraduate programme shall be offered to individuals who have completed a bachelor level degree. The levels of postgraduate programmes will comprise of: (i). Postgraduate Certificate programme (ii.) Postgraduate Diploma programme (iii) Master’s degree programme b)The structure of a postgraduate degree programme shall consist of various components that include taught/coursework, research and practicum. Each component of the programme shall be assessed separately)
    5. Rules and Regulations Governing Postgraduate Studies
    (The aim of the rules and regulations for Post Graduate Studies is to describe and clarify the basic principles for studies at Post Graduate level).

    Titus
    Participant
    Post count: 15

    1)UNIVERSITY ACT
    PART VII ACADEMIC PROGRAMMES
    Section 48 (1) University shall submit all their academic programmes to the commission for accreditation.
    Section 48 (2) for the purposes of paragraph (1) the commission shall – (b) Evaluate the proposed programmes employing the use of qualified peers in accordance with the criteria set by the commossion, and ensuring that the said university meets the various requirements and academic standard prior to the academic programme being launched.
    Section 48 (2c) ensure the evaluation processentails – (ii) evaluation of curriculum by peers for adherence to the set standards and determination of cohesiveness, breadth, depth, appropriateness, and relevance of the degree programmes.

    2) UNIVERSITIES STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES (ENFORCED BY COMMISION OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION)
    THIRD SCHEDULE
    STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES FOR AN ACADEMIC PROGRAMM
    (PROG/STD/02)
    Each level of academic programme shall be differentiated by specific attributes. Higher levels of academic programmes shall require more complex attributes according to Bloom’s Taxonomy.
    3) Master’s degree programmes
    (a) A master’s programme shall be designed to provide additional education or training in the student’s specialized branch of knowledge. It shall demonstrate mastery in a specific field of study or area of professional practice.
    (b) A master’s degree programme shall consist of a minimum of 630 instructional hours;
    (d) Research shall form an integral part of a master’s degree programme and shall constitute not less than one third (⅓) of the entire programme structure;

    4) Doctoral degree programmes
    (a) A doctoral programme shall be designed to train research scholars and, in many cases, future university faculty members. The programme shall:
    (i) Enhance knowledge at the most advanced frontier of the discipline or field of study;
    (ii) Provide the learner with the most advanced and specialized skills and techniques required to:
    • Solve critical problems in research and/or innovation; and
    • Extend and redefine existing knowledge.

    3) RULES AND REGULATION FOR POSTGRADUATE STUDIES
    Defined inline with university examination rules and regulations and enforced by the directorate/school of post graduate studies. The provide a guide to the student/faculty on how the postgraduate programmes executed.

    4) UNIVERSITY STATUTES
    STATUTE XV
    15.0 DEGREES, DIPLOMAS CERTIFICATES AND OTHER AWARDS
    15.2 Qualification for Conferment of Degrees and Award of Diploma and Certificate
    a. Save as otherwise provided by these Statutes, no candidate shall be awarded a
    Diploma or conferred a Bachelors degree unless He/she shall have undertaken
    approved courses and satisfied the requirements of the University as set by Senate.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Titus.
    Patrick Onyango
    Moderator
    Post count: 9

    What if another participant has said (meaning posted) exactly what I needed to post, can I just say “Ditto”? As in ditto @Titus?

    Marjolein Zweekhorst
    Keymaster
    Post count: 8

    @ patrick do you have to work at the same institute as Titus? :)

    Marjolein Zweekhorst
    Keymaster
    Post count: 8

    sorry this one was too fast.. i ment do you Happen to work at the same institute as titus?

    and the others thank you for sharing these parts of the institutional documents!

    Shonisani
    Participant
    Post count: 17

    1.Institutional calendar that guide admission procedure and requirement at postgraduate level.
    2. Plagiarism policy
    3. School research proposal guidelines
    4. The postgraduate Committee guidelines
    5. Institutional supervisory policy
    6. Institutional Strategic Research plan
    7. Ethical Clearance guide

    I am one of the postgraduate committee members. in this committee, the school higher degree committee review the research proposal before submit them at University Higher Degree Committee.in this stage the school check the compliance whether student follow school research proposal, the research concept addressed properly such as title is relevant, abstract, statement of problem, significant of the study and methodology.

    Susan Kilonzo
    Moderator
    Post count: 19

    University education in Kenya is governed by the Commission of University Education (CUE), formerly Commission for Higher Education (CHE). CUE is the regulatory body that oversees quality and standards in University Education and has provided a manual (University Standards and Guidelines-2014; might have been reviewed since then). The manual lists standard relating to institutional, physical resources, academic programmes, ODE-L, University Libraries, Technical Universities and Specialised degree warding institutions. All these, in my reasoning, are relevant for both undergrad and graduate education as they relate to quality, but as Christopher and Titus has enlisted above, there is a clear structure of how Masters and PhD programmes should be structured.

    At the University level, we do have research policy, anti-plagiarism policy, and postgraduate studies manual that guides admission and training of graduate students and their supervisors/lecturers. The various schools and institutes have manuals for proposal and thesis writing that they recommend to students to follow.

    Susan Kilonzo
    Moderator
    Post count: 19

    What distinguishes a masters level study from a doctorate?
    We do have some guidelines on this from the CUE: If I may quote just a few:

    A master’s degree programme
    – Shall be designed to provide additional education or training in
    the student’s specialized branch of knowledge.
    – Shall consist of a minimum of 630 instructional hours;
    – The structure of a master’s degree programme shall demonstrate the weighting of courses in relation to coursework and thesis/dissertation.
    – Research shall form an integral part of a master’s degree programme and shall constitute not less than one third (⅓) of the entire programme structure.
    – The length of the thesis/dissertation of a master’s degree programme shall normally be at least 20,000 words.

    A doctoral programme
    – Shall be designed to train research scholars and, in many cases, future university staff members.
    – Two kinds of doctoral level programmes exist at the same classification level, notably Doctor of Philosophy degrees programmes and professional doctoral degrees. A clear distinction shall be made between the Doctor of Philosophy degree programmes and professional doctoral degrees.
    i. Doctor of Philosophy degree programme shall focus on producing scientist
    practitioners who are mainly engaged in generating knowledge through research and teaching ;
    ii. Professional doctoral degree programmes are normally practice-oriented and focus on producing practitioner scholars who are engaged mainly in consuming knowledge, practice and active research.
    – Research shall form an integral part of a doctoral programme and shall constitute not less than two thirds (⅔) of the entire programme structure;
    – The length of the thesis/dissertation of a doctoral programme shall normally be at least 50,000 words.
    – Before the award of a doctoral degree, a candidate shall normally show proof of acceptance for publication of at least two (2) papers in refereed journals.

    So in the case of Kenyan institutions, this criteria is currently closely followed, and I think in some sense from the directives we can see some distinction in relation to the emphasis given in research, 1/3 versus above 2/3, and the number of words (though the word-limit does not make much sense for there are exceptions). Further, I see the distinction of the two from the perspective of advancement. A PhD scholar, who has already gone through Master’s level, should be more versed and well able to engage creativity and innovate in research. This is the reason why research component should form the bigger part of a doctoral programme. The expectation is not just to build one’s skills but to further the body of knowledge.

    My institution does not offer masters by coursework only, but I know there is a masters by thesis and masters by project. The latter is offered in very few departments since the vision of the Graduate School is to sharpen research skills of the students. Those taking masters by project do more courses than those doing by thesis.

    For PhD, for a long time, my University had been offering PhD by thesis but this has since 2018 been revised to revert to PhD by both coursework and thesis. My suspicion is that due to “massification” of university education in most parts of the continent, quality might be an issue and so engaging more with the students through face to face interaction and research projects might be useful.

    What constitutes a significant and original contribution in the academy and who determines this contribution?… There are many ways of responding to this question. One, the student, through the facilitation of the supervisor should come up with a clear research problem. This, as we know, takes different dynamics. It could from eminent challenges within the community or from personal leanings of the students and their research experiences. Of course literature review is important in shaping this research problem. During the Viva, we ask for a student to show how they responded to the problem and how their research filled the gaps identified while proposing the research. A clear articulation of how the study is novel, and the relevance of this novelty to questions around the study problem, is deemed good enough to contribute to the growth of the academy and practise as well.
    There are a number of bars that the student has to cross to prove that they do have a study. Supervision is the first, but then this is not enough. The peer review processes at the Departmental level, School housing the programme, School of Graduate Studies, The Senate, Ethics Committee, National Council of Science, Technology and Innovations, the Thesis writing process and defence are review mechanisms the enhance the quality of knowledge produced through the research project. This applies for both Doctoral and Masters levels in my University, and possibly many other Kenyan Universities. Subsequently, I cannot say that there is one sole individual or body that is responsible for determining original academic contribution. The process is multi-layered.

    I tend to imagine that as a social scientist and with training in sociology of religion; and, peace and conflict studies, I am a multi-disciplinary researcher. My strength is therefore in multi-disciplinary projects. I also had the same experience when doing my PhD studies. Because of the nature of my research, I was supervised by a political scientist from my institution, and a Historian of Religions from a different University. This diversity opened up my mind in diverse ways, and has been useful when dealing with multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary studies.

    Do I see it as my role to prepare students for supervision role in future? Not every PhD student intents to take this line of work, but my perspective is simple – make the best use of the opportunity you have with students. Mentor them in the best way you can. Let them remember you for your mentorship and especially your dedication to pay attention to their dreams and aspirations. This is likely to help them in future when dealing with their peers and juniors (or students) in future. In many instances, you hear lamentations of what friends and colleagues went through in the supervision process, and, these negativity is likely to also affect how they relate with their students.

    Kefa S
    Participant
    Post count: 23

    Standards for postgraduate education in Kenya are guided by a policy framework that begins at the national level and operationalised at the institutional level. Specifically, the Commission for University Education (CUE) is mandated, inter alia, to oversee the activities of the Higher Education Sector (universities, in our case). From the standards documents by this national institution, individual institutions develop customised rules and regulations for their postgraduate programmes. At Moi University, for instance, guided by the CUE document on Universities Standards and Guidelines (2014), the School of Graduate Studies in turn developed a document on Rules And Regulations Governing Post Graduate Studies (2018).
    I will tease out some excerpts from the two documents (CUE and MU), for purposes of exemplifying how the national framework is put into practice at an institutional level. On the allocation of students to supervisors, for example, the CUE guides Universities in the following way:
    “An academic staff shall be assigned students to supervise on thesis/dissertation
    based on a combination of his/her teaching load, administrative duties, and
    supervision, experience and capacity. The maximum number of students an academic
    staff shall supervise in any given academic year shall be:
    a) Masters – 5
    b) Doctorate – 3″(CUE, 2014:63).
    From this national policy stipulation, at MU, the relevant institutional has interpreted the allocation of students to supervisors as shown below:
    “… The maximum load for a supervisor will normally be (3) three Ph.D and (5) five
    Masters candidates at any one time.” MU, 2018:10).
    In essence, the link between what obtains at the national level by the university education regulator, CUE, and what takes place at an institutional level, it continues to be increasingly evident is in agreement.

    Lynn Kisembe
    Moderator
    Post count: 8

    Two of my colleagues from the same institution, have already shared on the national requirements/policies and so I will not repeat that here. The guidelines help to distinguish the masters level from the doctorate, by outlining the amount of work to be done, specifications of the end product, level or argument, different requirements among others.

    Significant and original academic contribution- my comment: I would ask this question to help me make an opinion on the significance and originality of a piece of work: To what extent does the work digress from the norm/tradition?
    In reviewing any kind of work, originality relates to newness, imaginations, creativity, novelty, innovation and the list can go on and on. How unique is the work in its way? This implies that the student did not only copy the ideas of others, re writing them in his/her own words. The student chiseled out extraordinary ideas, thought, insights. As one of my mentors puts it “The degree to which you have goose pimples within your being is an excellent reflection of originality and excellence,”in any piece of work you read.

    Lynn Kisembe
    Moderator
    Post count: 8

    Two of my colleagues from the same institution, have already shared on the national requirements/policies and so I will not repeat that here. The guidelines help to distinguish the masters level from the doctorate, by outlining the amount of work to be done, specifications of the end product, level or argument, different requirements among others.

    Significant and original academic contribution- my comment: I would ask this question to help me make an opinion on the significance and originality of a piece of work: To what extent does the work digress from the norm/tradition?
    In reviewing any kind of work, originality relates to newness, imaginations, creativity, novelty, innovation and the list can go on and on. How unique is the work in its way? This implies that the student did not only copy the ideas of others, re writing them in his/her own words. The student chiseled out extraordinary ideas, thought, insights. As one of my mentors puts it “The degree to which you have goose pimples within your being is an excellent reflection of originality and excellence,”in any piece of work you read.

    Sandra
    Participant
    Post count: 10

    In the Netherlands there is no specific legislation guiding supervision. Each institution in the Netherlands has regulatory and financial autonomy. In this way, our universities define master and doctoral education provisions and eventually supervision rules in their own regulatory documents. Our regulations for master thesis supervision differ per faculty and even department. Some departments prefer team supervision on master thesis, or peer review. Others facilitate one on one supervision at master levels. On doctoral levels, there is a rule that each PhD candidate has to have two supervisors. There are also specific provisions on who these supervisors can be. For instance, one has to have the ius promovendi title (or possibility to award a doctorate) and the other can be either an assistant, associate or full professor, or industry expert with a PhD.

    Regarding the relevant questions also posed in the module hereby my answers:

    1. What distinguishes a Master’s level study from a Doctorate?
    A master programme is a course programme with a duration of 1 or 2 years. In Nl, there is no Doctorate programme per se- there is a PhD trajectory. Our PhDs do not follow a programme in cohort with other PhD students, rather they engage on a research trajectory they defined themselves in consultation with their supervisors. It is a research project they embark on of duration from 3-5 years (usually). It is therefore also very personal and you work closely with your supervisors. From my experience as PhD student it is very important to choose your supervisors right, to be clear about what you want to achieve with your PhD, and to be clear what the expectations are on the other end.

    2. How is a Masters by coursework different from a full-thesis Master’s study? How does a Doctorate by coursework (if your legislation allows this) differ from a full-thesis Doctoral study?
    I explained this above a little. There is no programme for PhD studies and also no fixed ECTS or credit points to be achieved.
    Master programme counts on different elements including coursework which then realize the necessary number of ECTS credit points that allow a student to graduate.

    3. What would constitute a ‘significant and original academic contribution’ in your field? Who determines what constitutes the ‘doctoralness’ of a study?
    Your supervisors and the examination committee- if we are talking about doctoral degrees.

    4. Why is peer-review a measure of quality and how is this implemented in the doctoral process?
    Peer review is critical in the process of doctoral education. It helps a PhD candidate become a better scientist. It makes the PhD candidate reflect on their work, argument it better, and support it with stronger evidence. In the Netherlands, we mainly focus on producing article driven PhD thesis. This means that we want our PhD candidates to publish at least 2-3 articles (depends on the discpline) during their PhD studies. This ”learning by doing” is super useful in structuring one’s work and argumentation properly. It makes a PhD candidate very aware of what they are researching, why, how and to what end-as these are all the relevant questions they also have to clarify to peer audiences when submitting articles for revision.

    5. The Doctorate can comprise discipline-based, multidisciplinary or applied research. Where does your expertise lie and how might you approach supervision in another kind of research?
    My expertise is in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. I have approached supervision in another kind of research by actually suggesting another supervisor that is more familiar with the domain of multidisciplinary research-so we would work as a team.

    6. One outcome of the Doctorate is meant to be the ability to supervise. To what extent did your own doctoral study prepare you for this role? Do you see it as part of your role as supervisor to prepare your students to be future supervisors?
    I have to say that my PhD trajectory made me aware of what kind of supervisor I do not want to be. In that way it clarified what supervisors I think I am: I am a very personal supervisor, that focuses on growth and process, likes structure and provides support throughout the process. I am also the kind of a supervisor that is engaging (I like this from one of my supervisors a lot), pragmatic and listens to her PhD candidate. It is super important that we understand where the PhD candidate is from, what he or she knows, what they want to do after their PhD and help them navigate in that direction (whatever direction that might be).

    Michael
    Participant
    Post count: 2

    The key national and institutional documents that guide postgraduate studies in Kenya include:

    1. The Universities Act1986 and the subsequent amendments.
    2. University Charter
    3. University Statuses
    4.University Standards and Guidelines (2014).
    5.Rules and Regulation Governing Postgraduate Studies

    Jethro
    Participant
    Post count: 17

    For our University there is the Postgraduate supervision manual, the IRD strategy document, the green book on postgraduate supervision and Supervisor and Student Supervision contract documents

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 83 total)
  • The forum ‘Module 1’ is closed to new topics and replies.