In this theoretical paper we explore the authorial voice of black African postgraduate students in their writing and scholarship experience. This includes investigating the undergirding factors that need to be interrogated when it comes to the student-supervisor relationship. Some (if not most) black African postgraduate students experience…

Despite there being much research on the needs of students with more visible disabilities, this is not the case with students with invisible disabilities such as psychosocial disabilities -- especially in university settings. The unique needs of students with psychosocial disabilities have received less attention with not much research in this…

This study employs an Afro-centric framework of Digital "Unhu" (i.e. digital humanism) and netnographic accounts of supervisor-supervisee interactions to investigate Mobile Instant Messaging mediated interaction as a platform for honing students' career management competencies. While many existing studies foreground Western…

This paper presents an evocative autoethnographic account of my postgraduate supervision experience in two African institutions while dealing mainly with students in the computing disciplines of Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Technology. In this paper, the context of the postgraduate supervision, and the lessons learnt are…

South African universities have evidenced exponential increases in the numbers of doctoral students, bringing pressure to bear upon traditional supervisory practice. With the literature on the challenges experienced by international postgraduate students at South African universities being very limited, it was anticipated that the challenges…

Research suggests that identity development is a crucial dimension of the doctoral student experience. This study explores what identity formations doctoral students exhibit in the doctoral journey and how these formations affect their experiences in the process of achieving a doctorate. The methodology employed was within the qualitative paradigm…

The focus of this quantitative study was to investigate doctoral students' perception of connectedness in an open distance learning (ODL) environment. The study focused exclusively on Ethiopian doctoral students and investigated feelings of student-to-student and student-to-supervisor connectedness in an ODL environment. A total of 100 Ethiopian…

The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) by publication is gaining impetus as a format of doctoral output both nationally and abroad. This format has become the norm in some countries and within some disciplines. As more African institutions are considering formalising this format through institutional policy and practice, it becomes necessary to consider…

This paper analyses the determinants or factors that best explain student research skills and success in the honours research report module during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. The study reported in this paper employed the mixed methods approach comprising a quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative and econometric analysis of the…

The doctorate degree ranks third on the academic hierarchy, and is commonly viewed as an approval on a student by an institution, to conduct original research in at least one academic discipline. Several motivations drive the need to acquire a doctorate degree, and they include intrinsic interest, employment considerations, personal, and…

The use of social networking technologies (SNTs) for academic purposes has created new pedagogy opportunities, especially for well-resourced teaching and learning institutions. This article reports on a study that analysed the use of SNTs for postgraduate research supervision at a South African university classified as previously disadvantaged…

With increased pressure to publish, academics are pursuing creative ways to achieve enhanced research outputs. One such process is the publication-based thesis (PBT) for both masters and PhD candidates, rather than monographs. While this process is not novel in the sciences, it has not been widely applied by economic and management schools,…

This paper investigates the role played by the non-academic support systems that students can access during their master's journey within the Open, Distance and e-Learning context. In defining support, this paper draws on the theory of connectivism, which portrays relationships as a network with various connecting nodes. Traditionally, support for…

Enactivism, as an interesting and useful theoretical underpinning is gaining traction in Mathematics Education research. It forms the central theme of this paper whose aim is two-fold: first to describe and engage with how elements of enactivism informed a PhD study, both on a theoretical and analytical level, and second to reflect on the enacted…

This account explores the divergent perspectives of supervisor and student interacting in self-study research, showing how both participants were transformed by the experience. Although both supervisor and student had faced similar problems as mature students engaging in doctoral study, and both possessed strong convictions about their chosen…