Supervising Students and Managing Tasks

Supervising several students at once can be rewarding, but also demanding. Each student has their own pace, goals, and deadlines, and it can be difficult to keep track of what needs your input. You may find yourself scanning old emails or trying to remember what someone asked you to review last week.

ResearchDock offers a way to simplify this part of supervision.

Create a Project for Each Student

In ResearchDock, you can set up a separate project for each student. This keeps their work clearly organised and separate from others. Within their project, students can create and manage their own tasks. When something requires your input, they can simply assign the task to you.

This is useful when you want students to take more ownership of their workflow. You might say, “Add that as a task and assign it to me, and I’ll get to it when I can.” Once they do, it appears in your task list automatically.

All Your Tasks in One View

As a supervisor, you can view all your assigned tasks in a single place on your homepage, regardless of which student or project they came from. The tasks are sorted by date, helping you focus on what needs to be done soonest.

Instead of switching between conversations or asking students to remind you, you have a clear, up-to-date list of everything waiting on you.

A Simple and Flexible Task System

ResearchDock uses a kanban-style board for task management. Tasks are organised into columns such as "To Do", "In Progress", and "Completed", and you can move them easily as work progresses.

Tasks can include comments, attachments, deadlines, and priority levels. This format is familiar to many researchers and works well for both structured and informal workflows.

Students can keep track of what they are working on, and supervisors can quickly get a sense of how things are moving without needing a separate meeting or update.

Keep Private Lists Too

In addition to shared projects with students, you can also create private task lists for yourself in every project. These are useful for managing personal deadlines, grant submissions, or administrative work that does not need to involve your students for that specific project.

A Practical Approach to Supervision

ResearchDock is not a replacement for good communication, but it does support it. When students are encouraged to create and assign tasks, and supervisors can track them all in one place, the process becomes less of a burden.

Whether you are supervising one student or many, using a simple structure for task management can make your workload more manageable and help students stay more independent and accountable in their work.

Since ResearchDock is built with researchers in mind, if you are looking for a straightforward way to stay on top of supervision, creating student projects and shared tasks, ResearchDock is a good place to start.