The Africa Centre of Excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning (ACETEL), has held a meeting with supervisors in the centre to deliberate on the format for ACETEL student’s research project report.
The meeting was held on Tuesday, May 16th, 2023.
In her opening remark, the Director ACETEL, Prof. Grace Jokthan, apologized for the delay in rescheduling the meeting since it couldn’t hold at the former scheduled date due to other pressing assignments at the centre.
She revisited the issue of supervision allowance which supervisors had complained about in the last meeting as being little.
She said the Centre and the Post-Graduate school after considering the issue, sort the Vice-Chancellor’s (VC) approval for an upward review of the supervision fee.
She announced to the supervisors that the supervisor’s fees have been raised from the initial amount with an increment.
Jokthan said, “As academicians, we really cannot pay for knowledge and services, we can only attempt to pay some remunerations to help compensate for our time and efforts and I will also request that you kindly bear with us, this is an ongoing process and as we increase in the number of students the centre has, as well as the fees to be paid continuously, from time to time, it will get better.”
She called on supervisors to consider the number of students the centre has presently and the fees paid as they make request, while stating that the sustainability of the centre for World Bank funding should be considered.
ACETEL Programme Coordinator for Management Information Systems (MIS), Dr. Juliana Ndunagu presented a thesis outline for MSc and PhD for ACETEL programmes on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cybersecurity and Management Information Systems (MIS).
She gave a step-by-step explanation of the chapters and topics that should be in the research work as recommended by a group of professors who were asked to create a unified and acceptable format for ACETEL student’s research project work.
She said “thesis for PhD students should be a minimum of fifty thousand (50,000) words including references and appendix while the thesis for MSc students should be a minimum of (40,000) words including references and appendix.”
“Abstract for MSc and PhD students should be a maximum of five hundred words with a maximum of five (5) keywords, while the topic for both programmes should be eighteen (18) words.”
The supervisors, who are all PhD holders made various suggestions of what should be included in the thesis format and what the format should be like for students in AI, cybersecurity and MIS, as these courses have to do with technology.