Master’s & doctoral students

The Office of Graduate Studies at the College of Education pays special attention to Master’s and Doctoral students registered under the College. The primary objective of OGS is to offer support to M&D students with a purpose to increase the completion-rate of postgraduate studies. The OGS will collaborate with the College of Education marketing to recruit more M&D students to study education as a discipline.

Initiatives to ensure the completion rate of postgraduate studies

Management of supervision

The new College of Education has established a decentralized system that emphasizes accountability by the Chairs of Departments (CoDs) and streamlines the M&D registrations, recording, monitoring and tracking processes and procedures. This system is working well; students’ files on appointment of supervisors have been handled with extreme care and progress will be measured continuously.

Maintenance of a database of M&D students in the College

The OGS maintains data of M&D students by discipline. These sets of data indicate students’ first year of registration and progress.  The database is also used to evaluate the supervision capacity in each department, with the aim of establishing how many students each academic staff member is eligible to supervise.

The College of Education supervision management tracking instrument is aligned to the institutional one.

Research proposal module

The College has designed and developed a method for assessing students’ research proposals. This instrument helps to ensure consistency and quality in research proposal assessment.

Regional research writing workshops

The Higher degrees studies portfolio organized research-writing workshops in two of Unisa regional centres, Gauteng and Ethiopia. In regions, students’ attendance and participation was quite high. The Gauteng region workshop, held at the Florida Campus, and on average 150 students attended and in Ethiopia 80 students. In the evaluation of each of these workshops, students indicated that they would like to have more of these workshops. The College regards these as equivalent to discussions classes that the College runs per semester. Reports of both regional workshops have been shared with the office of the Executive Dean, School of Graduate Studies.

Future research writing workshops

The OGS is planning to have its two workshops in the regions to guide students in research writing.  The regional workshops will be within South Africa are planned for the following regions: Midlands, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga.  Current M&D and prospective students will form part of these workshops and students from neighbouring countries like Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Mozambique will also be invited.

M&D students’ queries

In an effort to promote quality communication with students, the College has established the Office of Students Affairs. The Student’s Affairs Office handles all student related enquiries from new student’s applications to graduations. This office does this by continuously providing the reliable and relevant information about the college and the university at large. The student affairs office is strategically located to bridge the distance between the students and the University in support of an ODL model. Student support is facilitated by use of telephone, e-mail and myUnisa.