We continue to catch up on highlighting last year’s Open Education Awards for Excellence. In this episode we hear from five of the 31 authors of chapters in Confident Supervisors: Creating Independent Researchers which was recognized with a 2024 Significant Impact OE Award. The significant of this resource was not only its filling a gap of open education resources (OERs) for supporting graduate supervisors but also for its focus on smaller universities and universities in less developed countries with limited access to resources and support for this topic.

While this podcast was recorded back in October of last year, featuring this work now is appropriate as the process for nominations for the 2025 will begin in the next few months. The team’s pride in their award was reflected in the update of the OER’s cover image added shortly before we went into the recording studio.

Confident Supervisors: Creating Independent Researchers

And what we were really looking for was to provide supervisory practice information to very much be a get up and find what you need to know to supervise, maybe in five minutes, with somebody who you’ve got an issue with, or work with a supervisor who perhaps you wanted to invite onto the team, but you’re not sure how to make that happen.

So each of the chapters begins with, three sort of, or three to five points saying, “why would you read this chapter? Whatcha gonna find out?”, a little video that just introduces the author and tells you a little bit about it, an introduction, some crunchy content, and then each chapter finishes off with some resources…. different sorts of things all aimed at helping supervisors, supervisor developers, and leaders of supervision within universities and within research centers to be able to build these collaborative cultures where supervisors feel supported, feel enabled, and build capacity to create the next generation of researchers.

Confident Supervisors Editor Susan Gasson

This conversation was coordinated by project lead and editor Susan Gasson and we were joined from authors/editors of Confident Supervisors from several Australian universities.

In the podcast recording studio with clockwise from top left, Susan Gasson. Claire Ovaska, jill Blacker, and Alan McAlpine. Not pictured but part of the conversation was Santosh Jatrana.

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In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

In this episode, hosted by Alan Levine from Open Education Global, we dive into the “Confident Supervisors” project, a significant OER (Open Educational Resource) recognized with an Open Education Award for Excellence in 2024. The project brings together a diverse team who created an open access book aimed at empowering higher degree research (HDR) supervisors with practical tools and strategies to support international and non-English speaking students.

We kick off with insights from several key contributors:

  • Susan Gasson shares her journey and inspiration behind the book, emphasizing the collaboration and global impact it has achieved.
  • Jill Blacker highlights her editorial experience and collaboration efforts.
  • Santosh Jatrana discusses the challenges and solutions for supervising international students, particularly from non-English speaking backgrounds.
  • Alan McAlpine offers insights on career support for HDR students, stressing the importance of providing effective career advice.
  • Claire Ovasca provides an overview of the open access movement and the library’s support in the project’s success.

The episode also explores future plans for a second volume that will address diversity, equity, and the use of different methodologies. The team discusses the impact of making such high-quality educational content freely accessible, showcasing a spirit of openness and collaboration.

This episode encapsulates the spirit of sharing knowledge, enhancing supervisory practices, and fostering a more inclusive and supportive academic environment globally. Tune in to hear the team’s passion and dedication towards making HDR education more accessible and impactful for everyone involved.

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 79

So how can we best up skill supervisors to have conversations that are beyond their own experience? … we’ll give advice, all well-meaning and all very well, but not necessarily something that is overly helpful or opens up the options for that student that’s sitting in front of them.

So the chapter provides some tools and helping them to help the student think and be empowered to take control of their own destiny. And not necessarily to get into that advice giving type model, but more how to ask questions that give the students choice, that empower the student to go and find out more information, to empower the student to actually think about what’s the right decision for them.

And in doing that we create far more useful educated people back out into society. Whether that be within the academy or outside the academy, it doesn’t really matter. But these are students, are individuals that we are educating to a really high level. So that’s really what motivated me to get involved.

Alan McAlpine

It just makes total sense for me to make such a fantastic resource well known and well received. And so looking at our metrics, I can confidently say that we are getting users from those countries that we were hoping to reach. We have strong use in Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, India. And believe it or not, America and the United Kingdom are also strong users.

So we just cannot assume that every university in, what is supposedly a first world country, has the resourcing to support their supervisors, to support their HDR students.

Claire Ovaska

Working with Abbe, Susan and the rest of the team to develop style guides and to connect with the authors. to connect with people that I hadn’t worked with before and broaden my own network ,that way was really helpful. Developing some tools we had a very big spreadsheet which was the heart of everything we did and everything was tracked in that spreadsheet.

So it’s a little bit old school, but it really was the thing that kept us all on track. We could really see where everything was at, and it allowed us to stick to our schedule, building slippage time, and meet our really idealistic goal of getting it done by the end of last year, and we were able to do that.

Jill Blacker

We hope this conversation not only inspired you to review Confident Supervisors: Creating Independent Researchers but also to start tihnking about OER you have co-created or put to use in your own open education efforts that shoul;d be considered for a 2025 Open Education Award for Excellence. Stay tuned to the OE Awards web site to learn when nominations open.

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Confidence by 1st Contact shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

Finally, this was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast, part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows. We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored except where indicated otherwise.