How to Accomplish High-quality Doctoral Education by Outsourcing the Supervision to the Students

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the possibility of extending the traditional bilateral relation of
supervision between the PhD student and the supervisor to additional human resources, e.g., other
PhD students, supervisors, or senior researchers. This process can be viewed as an outsourcing of the supervisorship to the students themselves – without bargaining with education quality. For this
purpose, we studied six cases from Swedish PhD education and discussed the outcome with respect
to five quality criteria: functional, enculturation, critical thinking, emancipation, and relationship
development.