PGCert Doctoral Supervision (African Time Zones)

Overview

Doctoral supervision fails when a candidate in a secondary city waits three weeks for a comment because the supervisor’s only tool is a 40 MB tracked-changes file. This PGCert starts with African time zones, load-shedding, and identity-checked milestones. You will design a meeting cadence, write feedback that can travel as a short PDF, and handle EN/FR co-supervision without erasing one language. African Future University is explicit: completing this certificate does not award a doctorate and does not replace faculty appointment rules at other institutions. It trains practice under the constraints of tuition-free online doctoral study. The award is a graduate certificate. It is not a PhD, not a professoriate, and not an AU research-council post. It is for supervisors who must keep a candidate’s progress honest when both parties are on prepaid data. You will compare a full-time urban candidate with a part-time rural candidate whose fieldwork window is seasonal. Identity-checked milestones are designed, not denied. Completing the PGCert still does not confer a doctorate. Study is tuition-free online aside from the examination fee, over nine months of supervised practice. PGCert Doctoral Supervision (African Time Zones) is taught as one award, not a list of unrelated modules. The published length is 9 months, and the credit total is 15. Students move from Power, Authorship, and Extraction through Power, Authorship, and Extraction; Part-Time and Rural Candidates; African Time Zones and Meeting Cadence; EN/FR Co-Supervision; Supervision Protocol, and finish on Supervision Protocol. Each course has a question, a method, and a submission. In this field, students apply the method of the subject to a defined problem and defend the result. Reading is a core text, a case or dataset, and a critique. The artefact a marker expects is a submission that shows the method, the evidence, and the limit of the claim. The award is built so that a graduate can do the following in practice: Design a supervision cadence across African time zones Give feedback that survives low bandwidth Write bilingual progress notes Teaching assumes the student can read a source, attempt a problem before the seminar, and revise after feedback. Attendance at live seminars is part of the design. The capstone or final course must use the methods of the earlier courses; a project that ignores them does not pass. The pages for each course name the topics that are examined. Those topics are the syllabus. A brochure line is not a substitute for them.

Fifteen credits: supervision ethics, time-zone operations, bilingual feedback, and a protocol capstone. Nine months. Examination fee 60. Does not confer a doctorate.