PACIFICSTREAM

Problem: The increasing numbers of students at universities worldwide do not match an equivalent increase of university funding and lecturing staff. Supervision is a time intensive and individual endeavor, based on private dialogues between supervisor and student. Time and funding allocated for supervision is not proportional to the actual time supervisors need to invest for each individual student. The problem with decreasing funding and time allocated to thesis supervision has far reaching consequences for thesis completion rates and the quality of theses produced. Feedback opportunities for students are too few, which leads to problems for students in staying on track and completing their project within the allocated time frame. Another crucial problem for social inclusion regards students from non-academic backgrounds (or immigrants) needing more feedback than students from academic backgrounds. In a situation when a large number of students need qualified education part of this communication has to be provided in other qualitative ways than private unique dialogues.
Aim: The overall aim of the Nexus project is to provide a flexible and semi-self adaptive ICT-tool for mass-individualization of supervision in thesis work at various levels a) Bachelor, b) Master and c) Ph D level. The system will also support knowledge creating project work in the business sector. The Nexus system will facilitate, increase, improve, internationalize and efficiently support the knowledge creating process by developing a smart ICT based model for supervision allowing for flexible adaptations to local and international academic criteria’s and preferences. As well as non-academic project based processes.
The Nexus system will create economies of scale in thesis supervision, create a system for digital scientific research content, increase European collaboration on thesis supervision, and remedy social exclusion. This will be achieved through merging the best of distance and campus education, creating a flexible educational tool useful in face-to-face supervision, mixed mode, or pure online supervision.
In order to facilitate economies of scale in thesis supervision the Nexus project aims to produce an ICT system that reduces the communication burden on the supervisor, but at the same time increases the feedback for students, and makes more information available in a flexible, economic, and time efficient way, thus leaving the unique dialogue between students and supervisor to the innovative and critical aspects of the particular thesis project.
To achieve this, the Nexus project is conceptually organized around supervision pathways that enable participating institutions to define, share, and modify supervision workflows to suit either local needs or pan-European educational networks. In order to further assist European collaboration the Nexus project aims to deploy multilingual scientific sources that will give students a European perspective on scientific work, thus leveraging the Nexus ICT-system as a cross border collaborative tool. A more engaging and motivational digital learning environment will by created by hyper videos and an innovative user interface allowing creative visual overviews of the scientific process, user control, interactivity and transparency.
The Nexus project will support students in the process of finding high quality digital content relevant for their research work. Nexus will work closely with librarians and informatics specialists to improve the access and relevance of e-resources related to thesis work