Implementing Flexible Systems in Doctoral Viva Defense Through Virtual Mechanism.

Abstract

Year 2020 has cultivated new arena in education. Covid-19 has not only reformed the world but also revived the process of operations. One among them is academics. Never in history of education was a lecture delivered without the physical presence of lecturers, in an academic environment. Even in present wildest innovative decade, the idea of eliminating the academia was not an option. However, after the pandemic encounter, it happened. These are not mere changes, but it is a transformation. While this phenomenon is getting acceptable gradually by takers, the mammoth turnaround is happening in Ph.D. final viva voce defenses too. Practice of online defense is approved by leading Universities so as to avoid stagnation of researchers in final stage. Question is, will it be appropriate to accept final defenses in online stream? and has the institutions developed rubrics to assess the researches which are presented online? Finally, if this is the only choice then how best we can use the technology to generalize it as a system? This research was executed through Delphi technique method from academia, research aspirants and policy-makers. Partial least square is used to quantify the data after interpreting qualitative data. Thirteen homogeneous University's respondents were used as sample. Focus of this paper remains to substantiate the benefits of emerging technology and developing a scheme for virtual streaming, rather identifying reasons to avoid them.