Building research supervision and training across Australian universities

Aims of the project

The incentives and inducements for universities to enhance, focus and improve their research, research training and rate of research degree completions have generated a range of initiatives. In regard to supervision training, these include shared cross institutional web sites, programs developed within some universities that are specifically for staff within that university and programs developed by one university and sold to another. These initiatives and the issues they raise of intellectual property and commercial viability intersect with the aims and resources of the fIRST consortium. To our knowledge there is no systematic overview of these initiatives, nor any systematic account of the various ways in which they address needs in supervision training.

The specific aims of the project were:

to identify existing higher degree research supervisor training provisions;
to identify current and future needs of supervisors; and
to make recommendations that assist universities in their on-going development of effective higher degree research supervisor training.