ARE THE CHALLENGES OF A NON-DIGITALIZED THESIS PROCESS TRANSCULTURAL?

According to the studies completed in Nordic universities (Finland and Sweden), the challenges of a non-digitalized thesis management process can be divided into those that are coordination-specific, supervision-specific and thesis writing-specific.Based on earlier studies, the coordination challenges primarily concern poor situational visibility, i.e., management and coordinators are not able to see if the theses are progressing or not and specifically which can produce problems.In addition, coordinators are also not typically able to follow the supervisors' circumstances, i.e., what is the real workload of each supervisor, how many students are lagging behind, which supervisors can take on more students, and to what extent and degree the supervisors are actively mentoring their students.Supervision challenges, in turn, are concerned mostly with communicating with the students: How well are supervisors providing quality feedback to their students, and to what extent are the supervisors tracking their students' progress and making sure they are following agreements and meeting deadlines?Thesis writing challenges are concerned mostly with the students being able to organize their thesis projects and communicating with their supervisors.If no centralized system is used, then communication is undertaken using several different media, such as emails, phone calls, LMSs, and instant messaging services.Later, it can be very difficult to track which media was used and where and when the latest communication and agreement occurred.Digitalizing the thesis management process is one way to solve these known challenges.However, as thesis management is knowledge work conducted by experts, its digitalization is not as straightforward as the mechanical work.To support such expert-oriented digitalization, an EXOD (expert-oriented digitalization) model was developed and based on it, a thesis management process was digitalized at one Finnish university of applied sciences (UAS).During that digitalization, an information system (Wihi) was also developed and implemented to support the process.In this study, we are applying a tool-based approach to thesis management process digitalization at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ).The hypothesis is that good practices developed during the thesis process of digitalization at the Finnish UAS can be transferred to another university in a different culture by adapting that already developed information system (Wihi).However, the first step of the research is to study whether we are solving the right problems, i.e., if the challenges of the GIJ thesis management process are similar to those that were found in the Nordic universities.To identify the main challenges of the thesis management process in GIJ and the main differences between the challenges in the Ghana and Nordic universities, we interviewed one thesis coordinator and three supervisors in GIJ in the fall 2022.We applied data-driven content analysis that focused on an organizational point of view, i.e., how university staff perceives the situation from their own role perspectives.Their buy-in is vital for any thesis management process digitalization success, i.e., digitalization must solve their current and identified problems.This analysis indicated that the challenges of non-digitalized thesis management processes are quite similar in GIJ and the Nordic countries, and based on that knowledge, the utilization of the good practices developed for the earlier thesis management process digitalization in the Finnish UAS is also a meaningful approach for proceeding with such a system in GIJ.