South Africa's higher education policies have opened up access to university for students from diverse backgrounds, with different learning styles, levels of motivation and levels of preparedness. This has necessitated a move from the lecture style of teaching to innovative teaching styles that engage the learners and equip them with skills to…

To enhance research into revitalising supervisory practices, the aim of this study is to identify approaches of supervisors to mentoring and facilitating doctoral students' progress. Scenarios were created to describe typical situations that supervisors face, namely non-responsive students, dealing with students with low English language…

Quality research supervision leading to timely completion and student satisfaction involves explicit pedagogy and effective communication. This article describes the development within an action research cycle of an online learning space designed to achieve these goals. The research "spirals" involved interventions in the form of instructive…

What constitutes successful practice for supervision of postgraduate students at an Open and Distance learning institution? In this article I describe a limited experiment in on-line teaching using a group of postgraduate students at the University of South Africa (Unisa). While the experiment has obvious limitations including the short time in…