Complexities of Online Thesis Supervision during the Covid-19 Pandemic: EFL Lecturers’ Perceptions

Abstract

The Covid-19 outbreak has resulted in the transformation of EFL undergraduate thesis supervision from offline to online, bringing with it its inherent complexities. Hence, this qualitative study sought to investigate the complexities associated with online EFL thesis supervision from the lecturers' perspective. The complexities in this study were conceptually categorized as problems and solutions. The participants were purposefully chosen. They were 30 lecturers from two universities in Central Java and Papua. The data were collected using interviews and analyzed using an interactive model. The findings revealed a variety of problems with online thesis supervision, such as facing difficulties in going along with the shift from offline to online thesis supervision, having ineffective interactions between lecturers and students, having less time available to constantly access online media, being hampered in the field data collection process because many schools students had targeted to collect their data held online learning, and suffering from a decrease in students' motivation. To cope with such problems, there were some solutions offered by lecturers. The lecturers asked students to remind them of the online thesis supervision schedule, making active use of communication technology, assisting students in interacting with authorized parties of students' research objects, and reorienting students' research data collection. Further research is expected to focus on a similar problem to that addressed in this study, but with a larger sample size drawn from various provinces throughout Indonesia. Such studies may be beneficial for extending our current findings and adding to the body of knowledge regarding online thesis supervision in the Indonesian context.