Hi, we held a special spin of meeting with the physics learning and teaching network to concentrate on postgraduate supervision during the COVID-19 crisis. It's such a wide topic that we invited as many people as we could and we were joined by biologists, chemists, education developers and even someone from Fine Arts people that were invited were asked to discuss four topics and report back so that we could capture some examples of good practice and some of the barriers that happen in postgraduate supervision at this time.

In between the discussions, we were joined by Doug Cleaver at Sheffield Hallam University and a member of the UK center of graduate education. You gave us some ideas there, sort of national and institutional perspectives on supporting supervision during lockdown.

Here's what Doug has to say. Venice, remember this data physics for 30 plus years and work on that side of my. My life is soft matter simulation. I'm also directing my university's doctoral school.

In addition to.

University based work and being member of the IO P. I'm also a member of this thing. the UK Council for graduate education. Let's say my institution is an almost certainly your institution is as well the 140 HP eyes are members of this thing. the UK CG and it's a membership organization whose mission is just to champion postgraduate education to sit above. If you like the.

Guys to give independent oversight and a bit of an interface with the outside World as well in respective.

Postgraduate education of which PG R is is clearly apart. There's an executive committee which I got elected onto a couple of years ago. There are a bunch of events that run. There are some subgroups working groups in respective director, doctoral school supervisors, doc school managers. Each of those areas got its own groups and then there was some professional networks as well.

So that allows me to think about the institutional and national perspective.

In my role in UK CG I've been sharing.

Regular meetings of Doc School directors. Every four or five weeks throughout lockdown.

Large numbers of got got together had now long seminar with another and discussed what what are, what are issues are and.

So it's giving me a general national understanding of what's going on in the minds of people like me and I will briefly trying.

Dump some of that on you.

Number one concern of any doctoral director at the moment is funding. It is extensions for bursaries and meeting the UK RI requirements. What to do about fees? Some institutions are going to.

Consider re framing phase. Others are definitely not what to do in relation to international funders. What about industry funders, which we probably got a bunch of legal contracts with, 'cause most contracts that support PhD students have got a legal basis to them?

#2 access how we're going to get back to work. What's work going to be like when we get back to it. What are the best ways of doing is in respect to field work labs, data collection in general making spaces? What about face to face working? There's a whole bunch of protocols that need to be put in place and probably aren't in place yet.

In respect to the students, what about equality? What about diversity? What about inclusion?

And then what about mental health and well, being of the research students and all the anxieties which are already in place which is significantly being heightened by the virus and by particularly the two items above.

Communication is really, really difficult at the moment we're used to having lots of corridor conversations. They are almost impossible to have.

Um?

Just communication upwards. Communication sideways communication downwards to colleagues and obviously to the students, and getting that getting that back, getting those noises back again.

What about the normal statistics, completions, submissions? What are the mechanisms for those? How they're going to be achieved? What about recruitment? Are we going to do recruitment? If so, have we got dispensation for it to be a little bit lighter next year?

And then the practicalities associated recruitment. Like how will admissions happen? What about students coming from other countries? They're going to need to go into quarantine. How will the arrival process be? What will their landing?

Process B, like how they be welcomed in if they are physically not able to enter the University. So that's a little bit of a.

Few things that keep me awake at night and the equivalent to me at your institution. But we don't just think about students. We are also thinking increasingly about supervision. I think the students there are our first concern, but certainly I'm I'm really concerned about supervisors and I'm delighted to see so many of you taking part in this event, and I think they're taking part in events like this. Or really are the best type of thing that.

Supervisors can do at the moment.

What are the issues that I've encouraged being supervisors to do well in the supervisions we all have essentially supervisory contract with our each of our students.

And actively revisiting. That is a vital early stage aspect. If any of your students have learning contracts.

Then how are they affected or influenced by the fact that the nature of the learning is different?

We've all been exploring, I'm sure possible mitigations how?

How is the research going to need to be changed given the practical difficulties?

The need to.

Change the research project because something's gone wrong isn't new.

A former colleague of mine, her PhD.

Halfway through her PhD, she built some nicer electronic gadgetry and and put it on an area and rocket, which then blew up on.

On the launchpad and PhD potentially got destroyed at that point, but it 'cause it didn't because they were mitigations. There were contingency arrangements put in place by her and her supervisor subsequently. Unusual thing is we're having to do this for lots of projects all at the same time. We actually hopefully give us some strength, 'cause a lot of us that are going to be able to share sharing, share ideas, recording progress I think is really useful thing. Some institutions are insisting on it.

We're all going to need to look back and see how much real progress was possible during lockdown. Ultimately, in terms of extensions and things like that, be able to see what we did manage to do, what we didn't manage to do.

From sometime in the future, I think it's it's going to be a necessary thing to do.

Yes, support for anxious students is something which yeah, I need to rely on supervisors to help achieve.

And part of that will be in relation to working up some paperwork in relation to extension requests. You are likely to be less anxious than your students. You are likely to have been somewhere a little bit like this before and be in a position to help put things in perspective. I'm not saying belittle the student views at all.

But I am saying.

Be being able to be more reflective and realizing that it is quite normal for things to go wrong within a PhD project.

And.

Some get stride and an alteran doesn't work, and therefore an alternative approaches is needed.

Another difficult thing for supervisors is maintaining contact with all those stupid new regulations on bringing in. I'm trying to bring in as few as possible, but I need to bring some in, but most obviously in respective examinations, for example, or in relation to extension requests for money.

How to access the little things?

Books working on IT systems and also identifying potential inequality's that your students are seeing. So we were talking in my group just now about identifying different.

Um?

As students based in different places or experiencing different things they might have carrying responsibilities themselves and coping with that, and knowing where to go as a supervisor to find.

The facilities that would normally be really straightforward or wouldn't be needed.

Try to be positive.

There are opportunities. There are opportunities around at the moment, certainly in relation to collaboration.

Because the fact that you're in whatever town you're in and someone other genius or expert in the field might be located 200 miles away or a couple of 1000 miles away. And you never think about talking with them but bringing them into supervisions can work really well. We brought the industrial supervisor in to one of my regular supervisions and he joins for every four or five sessions in a way that we wouldn't do normally. Some of the seminars and conferences that are available.



The APS March meeting. I had a great time just sitting in my office watching all these talks that were meant to be happening in Colorado, but the APS meeting got cancelled. It all got moved online and there were a bunch of talk so I wouldn't normally and my student wouldn't normally be able to access. These things are out there an effort to engage with them, but.

It's an additional resource.

But supervisor well being in addition to student well being is a real issue for me. All these time pressures that we've been talking about in the.

In the previous.

Group chats.

Isolation of supervisor supervisor thinking that they have to be the one person that solves everything is a real issue for me from institutional perspective and I need to provide those escape valves, escape routes and today's session is one of those. But knowing where in your institution you need to go in order to find certain things out and you not feeling really bad at the labs are closed 'cause the labs being closed is not your fault and you can't do a fat lot about that at this moment in time.

And you probably can't give a clear message to the students, and that's a very difficult thing too.

To deal with.

Making supervisors and students take a holiday.

That's a big one.

Summers here we should be thinking about Holidays.

And which are good for us and then item 3 examination in lockdown which initially was the top of the list. We all moved all of our bibles online and established protocols for doing that and change regulations.

Generally, nationally, that's working pretty well. Different places doing it slightly different ways and places, recording them all. Some places are using institutional chairs. One little change that we brought in just a few weeks ago.

It was that obvious really was to offer for our print unit to produce hard copies of the thesis and dispatch those to the examiners, because except doing a doctoral examination by by screen or using an iPad or something like is a hateful thing to do, absolutely exhausting.

Longtime quick look at the questions, I think, and then decide whether I want to keep going with this. I won't show it.

Tried to stop or should I say look more like a CG.

If you could just do a quick slide on it, yeah?

So UK CG is got a really good website which is covered in resource is most of which are large, number of which are free. There's special pages all about things put together just in relation to COVID-19. There's a kind of large PDF guide on effective supervision practices is well worth the read.

Is some recordings of webinars?

Hours so like so long Abit Liography this in separate section about online drivers. So if you think if you been lined up for a Viber there's some videos about that.

And some guidance documents from the student perspective, if your supervisor and you want to direct your student to something to think about their their Viber, that's a really good resource. And there's a bunch of online resource is an events going on, and actually their Twitter feed at UK CG is something worth.

Really worth registering on?

And and following, and there's a bunch of stuff things happening. There's an annual conference which is got some fees required for it, but a lot of stuff is just just freely available.