Amongst all this activity I attended a staff development session on bidding for research grants. The session was targeted at new academic staff introduced by PVC research confirming the benefits of obtaining funding (building critical mass through research assistants, enhancing reputation, improving the research infrastructure). We talked about the importance of full economic costing and the REFs new focus on assessing the impact of the research on other stakeholders as well as the academic community.

Then a panel of seven experienced researchers came to front, to answer questions from the audience. The first question asked the panel ‘do you have to be a man to be a researcher here then?’. The six men shifted in their seats. The one woman reminded us of the need to work evenings and weekends if we wanted to make it.  The need to have ‘a passion’ for research was impressed upon us, along with the benefits of networking with disciplinary colleagues who sit on grant awarding panels. Hmm…

Here’s a quick summary of the more useful advice.

The ideas stage:

• team up with someone who is good
• start with smaller grants
• conceive of what you want to do as a ‘project’ with ‘outputs’
• make sure you are bidding for research, not just your own personal scholarly activity
• look at the awards the funder has already distributed
• go to conferences, get known, find out what fashionable topics are currently being funded
• do a 1 page ‘concept note’ of the project you are thinking about, circulate it to colleagues for comment
• publish at least one paper every year. It’s much easier to write a proposal if you are keeping up with the literature

Writing the bid:

• match your project with the funder
• make a timetable for bid preparation, give it the time it deserves, don’t leave it until the last minute
• be prepared to adapt your interests to what the funders are prepared to fund
• demonstrate your track record (of publications)
• make sure the bid includes a good chunk of time for the principal investigator
• use your school’s research director and grants panel for advice and support
• be prepared to share your draft bids with colleagues
• specify the impact of your research on policy and practice as well as the academic community
• work up the ‘case for the project’ section, give it to people to read, make sure it gets to the point (a common problem is bids spending too long on the background and not getting to the point of what you want to do)
• make sure the bid is costed appropriately. For the institution this means not under-costed, for the funder this means justifying the resources (why do you need 0.2 of this individual rather than 0.1?)

and then..

• the reality is a 1 in 3 success rate
• turn failed bids into papers so the effort is not wasted
• have more than one research theme going at the same time, so you can always have one bid in submission.

We are having a launch & consultation meeting on Thursday 3 December 2009, 2 – 3.30pm in Buckley BG05. Here’s the blurb…

The OCSLD Research and Knowledge Transfer Strategy has been developed in response to the amount and quality of research activity currently being undertaken, and supported by, OCSLD. This strategy reviews current pedagogic research activity and identifies areas of strength. We will consider the three strands of future activity proposed in the strategy.

1. If Brookes is to make a substantial contribution to pedagogic research nationally and internationally (and to REF 2012), we need to build capacity around some core themes. Around what research themes should we concentrate our efforts?
2. There is potential to use our research expertise to contribute to improvements to the student experience at Brookes. What primary investigations or evaluations of the student experience could we undertake?
3. We need to support the development of pedagogic researchers within Brookes in order to build sustainable, ongoing capacity for (1) and (2) above. What staff development activities could we provide, within the resources available?

Section One: new contexts for learning

1. The influence of pervasive and integrative tools on learners’ experiences and expectations of study
Sara de Freitas and Gráinne Conole

2. Social networking: key messages from the research
Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn

3. Managing study and life with technology
Linda Creanor and Kathryn Trinder

4. Constructs that impact the Net Generation’s satisfaction with online learning
Charles Dziuban, Patsy Moskal, George Bradford, Jay Brophy-Ellison and Amanda Groff

5. Provisionality, play and pluralism in liminal spaces
Maggi Savin-Baden and Cathy Tombs

Section Two: frameworks for understanding learners’ experiences

6. Understanding students’ uses of technology for learning: towards creative appropriation
Rhona Sharpe and Helen Beetham

7. Expanding conceptions of study, context and educational design
Peter Goodyear and Robert Ellis

8. How learners change: critical moments, changing minds
Judy Hardy and Amanda Jefferies

9. Learning with a different ear: understanding disabled students’ relationship with technologies
Jane Seale and Nick Bishop

10. Strengthening and weakening boundaries: students negotiating technology mediated learning
Laura Czerniewicz and Cheryl Brown

Section Three: new learning practices

11. The changing practices of knowledge and learning
Helen Beetham and Martin Oliver

12. Analysing digital literacy in action – a case study of a problem orientated learning process
Thomas Ryberg and Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld

13. Collaborative knowledge building
Greg Benfield and Maarten de Laat

14.‘But it’s not just developing like a learner, it’s developing as a person’: Reflections on e-portfolio based learning
Julie Hughes

15. Skills and strategies for e-learning in a participatory culture
Simon Walker, Jill Jameson and Malcolm Ryan

The trouble with such a large and busy community trying to work out where to post/find stuff and our site at elesig.ning.com looks more messy by the day (ringing any Emerge bells anyone?). So, our first task is – how do we make it easier for our members to share and find what they know about learner experience research? As well as our current Ning site, we are going to look the suitability of Confluence Wiki, Drupal and Cloudworks (anything else we should be looking at?). I imagine these dynamic resources as being created by ELESIG members, for ELESIG members. They need to be part of the community itself, proving opportunities to interact with other researchers as well as being easy to navigate (thinking tagging, RSS feeds)

Second, we were successful in early summer in bidding to the Higher Education Academy for continuation funding (with huge thanks to the Academy for all their financial support). The focus of that bid was to produce resources that help inform decision making at local and national levels. So, how can we capture what we know about learners’ experiences of using technology in a way which can help those decision makers use it. Here I guess the emphasis is on providing the interpretative overlay – what do these results mean? and on efficient ways of staying informed. I’m thinking about how we use EvidenceNet and I keep coming back to print although I’m willing to be talked out of it.

So, as a starting point, we have used some of the HEA funding to support seven small grants. We asked members to think about how they can share their knowledge and practice and I’m really pleased with the results. This year ELESIG members will be:

• running a regional group in the midlands (Rob Howe, University of Northampton)
• blogging about a project capturing learners’ experiences of audio feedback (Shirley Hunter-Bassett, Edge Hill University)
• compiling an annotated bibliography of the literature of international students’ experiences of e-learning (Terri Rees, University of Plymouth)
• conducting a review of the ‘literature of mobilities’ (John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton)
• involving international students in ELESIG activities (Esyin Chen, University of Glamorgan)
• interviewing researchers about using participatory research approaches to engage disabled learners in research about learners’ experiences (Mike Wald, University of Southampton)
• videoing interviews with researchers about appropriate paradigms and methodologies for learner experience research (Shalni Gulati, City University)

I think that’s a great start, an impressive list of ideas for ways of sharing what we know. There will be further calls for small grants in January and July 2010 so start thinking about how you could add to this list.

1. OCSLD has been supporting our own members to undertake more and better research. We have had success with funding and a great writing group which meets regularly.  We also offered such support nationally e.g. JISC Learner Experience, ELESIG and we write and run workshops and online courses around our own interests e.g. qualitative analysis and evaluating e-learning. We need to build capacity for undertaking pedagogic research within and beyond OCSLD by extending our support at Brookes i.e. to scope and advertise a programme of support for pedagogic researchers. The challenges are around focussing our research interests and approaches around coherent themes, supporting people to work together and build a critical mass.  Also, there are other groups within Brookes who offer e.g. research seminars and workshops and we’ll need to work together.

2. Most of the research we’ve done in recent years has been externally – for other organisations and institutions. We’d like to encourage the university to use OCSLD’s research skills to help Brookes tackle its current challenges and enhance the learner experience. This is not as easy as it sounds and there are dangers. We need to be careful how we position ourselves – somewhere between external evaluator and critical friend. We need to demonstrate that we can do this with skill and sensitivity.

3. We have real strengths in knowledge transfer. Much of our research has been funded by external organisations which demand dissemination and an evaluation of its impact. Our core business is professional development. We should be able to use all this expertise to ensure that teaching at Brookes is informed by our own research (assessment is a good example of where this is already happening) and by the current pedagogic literature.

So, that should keep me busy. I’m interested to talk to other people who have writing pedagogic research strategies and/or setting up new centres. Thanks.

• developing skills and techniques in eliciting what we need from learners
• time to tease out the similarities and differences between ‘young people’ and ‘learners’
• the need to conceptualise differences in how learners experience learning with technology
• the need to identify theoretical frameworks to help analysis of the rich and varied data which emerges 
• the need to unpick the role of context in how learners use technology 
• understanding the development of digital skills and literacies, the role of educators in developing these literacies and their transferability between social, leisure and study contexts
• the challenge of conducting research which demands early and frequent dissemination