Online coaching in thesis supervision: A qualitative study

Abstract

Students of online graduate or undergraduate programs are also needed of master or bachelor thesis to get their diplomas. In most of the cases, directors and students must face these processes online. However, despite the overall satisfaction with the online learning process, for these works, some students express negative attitudes, such as mistrust and insecurity. Obviously, these negative attitudes are not conducive to learning and student performance. As a result, supervisors are required to minimize the effects of these negative attitudes. Therefore, the monitoring activity is not limited to academic leadership, but also an activity similar to coaching. In this paper, authors investigate what lays behind bachelor and master thesis supervision in online settings. Specifically, authors sought to determine whether academic direction occur while coaching processes. In order to do so, authors applied an open questionnaire to a sample of supervisors. This questionnaire includes questions on four aspects: students' negative attitudes, strategies applied to reduce inappropriate attitudes and to promote good ones, similarities to coaching processes and finally, consideration on the difficulties of online supervision compared with the traditional one in terms of general difficulties, more negative student's attitudes and more effort during supervision. Results show that the majority of the supervisors interviewed had to apply some managerial complements to their duties. These strategies can be considered true coaching processes, although there is not substantial difference between conventional online supervision and traditional supervision of bachelor and master thesis.