Adult students in web-based thesis seminars : insights and challenges for supervision

Abstract

We examine the web-based thesis seminars in the context of academic adult education in our article which presents and reflects on the development of web-based teaching. Our reflection is based on our own web-based teaching experiences in the open university and in the class teachers' adult education programme aiming at the Master's degree, and in the feedback material that has been collected from the students. We first examine web-based seminars from the point of view of educational equality and accessible learning environments. Then we will analyse the requirement of scientificity of university context and the objectives related to the interaction and the adult educational solutions in web-based seminars. From this basis we describe and propose adult educationally good practices for web-based thesis seminars and also more widely for science-based online education. Our evaluation material which is related to the pedagogical development consisted of the group feedback discussion of adult students (N=60) who had participated in the web-based thesis seminars and of written self-assessments and feedback. As the theoretical mirrors of pedagogical solutions we use the sociocultural learning theory and the trialogical model of learning (Paavola & Hakkarainen 2009).