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Yearly Archives / 2018

Training opportunity – completing and submitting your IRAS application

Post-award, Research Ethics

Are you currently in the process of designing, setting up or planning your research study, and would like to extend your project into the NHS?

Yes? Then you may want to take advantage of this training opportunity.

Suzy Wignall (Clinical Governance Advisor, R&KEO) and Laura Purandare (Research Q&I Manager, Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospital) will be running a training session on how to use, and complete your own application within the IRAS system. IRAS (Integrated Research Application System) is the system used to gain approvals from the NHS Research Ethics Committee and Health Research Authority, before rolling out your study to NHS Trusts.

The training will take place in Studland House, room 117 on 4th  July at 09:30am – 12:30pm.

Get in touch with researchethics@bournemouth.ac.uk if you would like to register your interest and book a place.

BU will also be required to ‘sponsor’ the research study and we can advise and guide you through the process of applying for this, and on all aspects of conducting research in the NHS.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Erasmus+ Staff Mobility (Teaching) experience at the University of Beira Interior (UBI)

Post-award, Student Engagement

I just came back from a beautiful place in Portugal, Covilhã, where I went to deliver teaching to the Department of Management and Economics (Faculty of Humanity and Social Sciences, UBI) students. Covilhã is a city surrounded by mountains.

Serra da Estrela is the highest mountain range in Continental Portugal

It is because of its location, access to water and forest, the city was chosen as the Portugal’s centre of wool and fabrics making. In fact, Covilhã used be known as Portuguese Manchester. However, industrial crises led to a close of numerous factories, with these that are left operating now mainly producing wool for export purposes. Streets of Covilhã are continuous reminder of its heritage and history via unique street art.

UBI is a public university that was established in 1973 as Polytechnic Institute (hence very similar to BU). Currently, UBI hosts more than 7000 students who study across five faculties, Arts and Letters, Sciences, Health Sciences, Human and Social Sciences, and Engineering.

UBI – main campus

The BU-UBI Erasmus staff exchange partnership was first established by Professor Chris Shiel back in 2010. As it stands both institutions have not extended the partnership to cover student exchange because up until now UBI has not delivered their content in English. While teaching digital marketing to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, I have met many Erasmus+ exchange students who came to UBI from Bulgaria, Poland, Spain and Brazil.

UBI – Faculty of Human and Social Sciences

Majority of students expected teaching delivery in English and for this reason, as well as increasing interest towards UBI from EU students, from September 2018 the Department of Management and Economics starts delivery of their business and management courses in English. In light of such positive improvements, it is worth for us reviewing our Erasmus partnership with UBI.

Back to main focus of this post: this teaching opportunity was my first experience of teaching outside the UK and Russia, and first experience of engaging with Erasmus+. My teaching content and learning outcomes were agreed prior to the visit. I was down to teach aspects of e-commerce [I decided to talk about Headless Commerce instead] to final year BA (Hons) Marketing (1st cycle programme) students and digital marketing communications to MA Marketing (2nd cycle programme) students. In both cases students had not covered the topics previously so my aim was to introduce these, explain basics, critique applications and instil interest to read further. I did, however, felt nervous about the language, the pace of teaching and students’ understanding of concepts which might not have been applicable to the context of Portugal. All these fears disappeared as soon as I went to the classroom, saw students and started teaching. Both UG and PG students were extremely engaged with the content. In fact they were complimentary of visual images and infographics.

with final year BA (Hons) Marketing students

Students engaged in discussions as they could easily apply theory to practice and share examples of social commerce or search engine marketing from personal experiences. In fact, I experienced what I could call a teaching co-creation process that benefited both I and students. Students learnt from my UK-based examples and I have learnt so much from students on how digital marketing is done in Portugal. Together we debated nuances of newly implemented GDPR – this sparked so much interest. Being an advocate of digital pedagogy via extending classroom engagement to social media spaces, I had to offer an opportunity to UBI students to connect with me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Many of them were surprised and connected immediately. Strangely UBI academics were asking me about this as they were surprised how quickly I persuaded students to engage. I shared with UBI academics few links to BU’s TEL videos and they were quite intrigued by an institution wide initiative to encourage use of educational technology to enhance student experience.

Having spent five days within UBI’s walls (28.05.2018-1.06.2018), I managed not only to deliver teaching but also network with UBI’s academics, present my research (in particular recently accepted research paper on deployment of mobile technology by creative B2B SMEs and its impact on service innovation practices) and deliver a session on netnographic methodology to UBI’s academics and PhD researchers (some of whom came to Covilhã from Brazil).

with the UBI academics and PhD researchers

Moreover, the visit was a fantastic opportunity to promote the upcoming 17th International Annual Congress on Public and Nonprofit Marketing that takes place in Bournemouth on 6-7 September 2018. Deadline for abstract submission was extended to 2nd July, so if your research covers public and nonprofit contexts, then hurry up and submit your abstract via: https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/about/our-faculties/business-school/department-marketing/international-congress-public-nonprofit-marketing/theme-submission-details

Finally, as somebody who now lives and breathes Fusion my visit could not be all about teaching. In relation to a joint BU-UBI research, Dr Arminda do Paço and Dr Helena Alves are now working with me on two projects, (1) trust and communication, linked to the Faculty of Management QR-funded project on Trust Repair; and (2) circular economy – a comparative study of consumers’ perceptions in the UK and Portugal. Work on both projects is at the conceptualisation level with the team planning to seek an ethics approval in July and commencing data collection by end of July 2018. To keep up to date with developments connect with me on Twitter or read my work on ResearchGate. In relation to professional practice linked to future research and education, I was privileged to visit the UBI’s Wool Museum.

It has been an amazing experience to hear all about sustainable manufacturing and business practices adopted by wool making factories, practices which are challenged by fast fashion and postmodern consumerism. Sustainability is one of the UN’s, EU’s and the UK’s key research areas. Dr Arminda do Paço and I are now discussing potential to work on joint research involving industrial partners as well as opportunities to organise international field trips for BA Business Studies, BSc Marketing and BA Retail Management students.

In conclusion, this week in Portugal was busy and at the start nerve wrecking, but overall extremely positive and led to many more exciting opportunities for BU and UBI to foster our partnership, work on international research, share best practice in teaching and learning and meet again in a sunny Bournemouth this September.

If you wish to experience something new, share and enhance your teaching practices, I would highly recommend to apply for the Erasmus+ Staff Mobility Teaching funding.

Elvira Bolat, Global Engagement Lead (Department of Marketing), Senior Lecturer in Marketing (The Business School), e-mail: ebolat@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

Doctoral College June NVivo Workshops – open to all

The Doctoral College is hosting two NVivo workshops. If you would like to attend either of these workshops please follow the instructions below.

 

Please note that to book onto the Advanced NVivo workshop you need to attend the Introduction to NVivo first.

 

 

‘GDPR for Charities’ workshop: a report

Fusion themes, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

On Monday, June 11th we ran our long planned ‘GDPR for Charities’ workshop at the Enterprise Business Centre.  This workshop was one of the outputs from our Charity Impact Acceleration Scheme funded project to help a local charity with their GDPR readiness activities.  The aim of this workshop was to share the techniques and lessons learned from this project with the wider non-profit community in the Dorset region and beyond.  This was a one-day event attended by around 40 participants working for or with charities of various sizes.

Shamal Faily opened the workshop (slides) by setting out some of the challenges faced by charities making sense of GDPR, before giving an overview of what would be planned for the day.

Jane Henriksen-Bulmer then gave an overview of GDPR and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) before presenting the ‘DPIA Data Wheel’ – a step-by-step process for carrying out a DPIA (slides).

The participants were then divided into four groups and, with the assistance of our BU facilitators, used the Data Wheel to conduct a DPIA for a hypothetical but realistic scenario. The groups then came together to present the privacy risks they found to the rest of the participants.

After lunch, Tessa Corner delivered a talk on StreetScene‘s experiences applying the DPIA Data Wheel (slides), before Shamal gave a talk on how to find security & privacy risks, and demonstrated the use of CAIRIS to support the discovery and management of risks (slides).

After these talks, Raian Ali hosted a lively panel on GDPR and its implications for charities before Jane closed the day by summarising some of the results of applying the DPIA Data Wheel with StreetScene (slides) and discussing some next steps to build on the momentum from this workshop (slides).

If you’re interested in finding out more about the workshop, or would like to get involved in any follow-on activities then please contact Jane Henriksen-Bulmer or Shamal Faily.

What students really want (and why it matters)

Centre for Excellence in Learning, Student Engagement, student research

BU hosted Dr Diana Beech from the Higher Education Policy Institute on Wednesday morning for a policy breakfast, part of this year’s CELebrate symposium.  In a packed room and despite the early start, we had a great discussion about student perceptions, value (and value for money).

Diana started with a review of the HEPI/AdvanceHE 2018 Student Academic Experience Survey, which was published last week.  The survey was  established in 2006, so is now in its 12th year, giving useful data trends.  It surveys over 14,000 full-time undergraduate students in all years of study (not just final year students like the NSS).  The full survey is available to download for free.

  • It seems from the data, that contact time and private study have not changed much since 2006, despite the many changes in the sector, including growing student numbers, changes in funding etc.  However, since 2012, when fees were increased, perceptions of value for money by the students surveyed have fallen consistently – until this year.  This year the percentage of respondents saying that they believed that they were getting good, or very good value for money for their course, moved up from 35% to 38%.  And the percentage saying they got poor, or very poor value for money went down from 34% to 32%.  [Ed: These figures are often cited by Ministers, and were by Sam Gyimah at his speech last week (see our policy update last week for more on this topic) – “only [just over] a third of students think they get value for money” is the headline, and the government’s own initiatives in terms of a relentless focus on quality through the TEF, the new regulatory environment etc are credited with the improvement].
  • Diana described how this year a new question had been asked about what the reasons were behind the rating that had been given for value for money – for those saying that they received good or very good value, the top 5 reasons (in order) were teaching quality, course content, course facilities, career prospects and quality of campus.  On the other side, the top 5 reasons given by those who received poor or very poor value for money were tuition fees, teaching quality, contact hours, course content and cost of living.  It is interesting that teaching quality and course content are levers for good or bad value for money, that concern about money is clearly linked to perceptions of poor value.  It is also unsurprising to see contact hours linked to perceptions of poor value, but it may be of some surprise to see quality of campus linked to good value.
  • So on contact hours, Diana noted that those students with the highest perceptions of value for money also seem to be studying subjects with the greatest overall workload.  [Ed: This is not necessarily linked to contact hours – looking at contact hours the subjects seem to fall into three groups, with medicine, dentistry and veterinary and physical sciences standing out for the number of contact hours (15-19) and history, languages, business and social studies at the other end (8-10).  The rest fall in the middle, but the chart looks at total workload including independent study and work outside the course].
  • Diana also flagged another trend – the percentage of students saying that their experience has been better than they expected has fallen fairly consistently since a high point in 2013, and has fallen again this year from 25% to 23%.  Again, when students saying that the experience was worse than expected (12%), teaching quality came top of the reasons, with course organisation [Ed: a familiar NSS question], lack of support in independent study, lack of interaction with staff, poor feedback (Ed: NSS again) and contact hours featuring again.  The last two of the top 8 reasons were “not put in enough effort myself” (30%) and “too little interaction with other students” (26%).
  • Diana talked about commuter students, who are less likely to be satisfied, and more likely to say that if they had known what they know now, would not have entered HE – along with those who are employed for more than 10 hours and Asian students.  There is intersectionality here, Asian students and those who are employed for more than 10 hours have a higher propensity to be commuter students.  Diana talked about her recent report for HEPI looking at the potential growth in undergraduates by 2030 (as many as 500,000 more) – and the possibility that many of those may be commuter students – a challenge for the sector given the concerns raised above.
  • Developing this theme, Diana mentioned the recent paper written by Sir Anthony Seldon and Dr Alan Martin on the “positive and mindful university“.
  • Diana referred to the HEPI/Unite Students report “Reality Check – a report on university applicants’ attitudes and perceptions”.  One concern is that only 49% of applicants realise that rent will be their biggest cost apart from tuition fees.  Diana discussed concerns about whether students understand where their tuition fees are spent, and the interesting response to the question about how tuition fees should be spent (teaching facilities (65%), teaching staff (60%), student support services (57%) come top, campus development (52%), financial support for students (49%) and research facilities and resources (49%) come next.  Interestingly student recruitment and marketing are lower on the list (at 16% and 15%) and investing in the local community is supported by only 12%.

You can read Diana’s slides here.

We then had a Q and A and discussion session with a panel consisting of Debbie Holley, Lois Farquharson, Alex Hancox and Diana and chaired by Jane.

  • We discussed commuter students and the particular issues of making the campus “sticky” for these students, particularly in relation to HSS students who live near work and final year students who may have put down roots in their placement year and becoming commuter students is one reason why they can find it hard to reintegrate in their final year (there may be other reasons too). [Ed: see an interesting article on Wonkhe this week on stickiness generally)
  • We discussed issues linked to value for money – should we talk about value, and not focus on financial return [Ed: see last week’s policy blog for our take on the latest ministerial pronouncements about graduate salaries]
  • We also talked about the wider value of university in terms of life experience, friendships, soft skills- and how this is important but often overlooked [Ed: there are a couple of interesting articles on this in last week’s policy blog]
  • We talked about student information and the importance of making sure that applicants could access the information about the things that mattered for them, and how talking to students, and spending more time than just an open day, might be an important part of this.  We discussed briefly the importance of students understanding how their fees are spent (which is in the survey) and how to do this better.
  • In terms of expectations, Alex pointed out that students were overloaded with information in induction week and it was suggested that we need to follow up, drip feed etc.
  • We talked briefly about tuition and living costs.  Points were made about how challenges with living costs might be increasing the number of commuter students and affecting their outcomes.  We also discussed the unhelpful terminology around loans, debt, value for money, tuition fees that are really “university fees”.  [Ed: This is a very big subject, you might want to read BU’s response to the review of post-18 education and we gave links to other sector responses in our policy update on 4th May.]
  • We talked about mental health and wellbeing – including about how some students might choose to live at home for support.  We also discussed challenges with the definition of “living at home”  – it may be different issues for mature students who have families than 18 year old students who live with parents – although the impact on extra-curricular engagement may be the same
  • We talked about engaging students with research and equality of access to these sorts of opportunities for broader engagement
  • We discussed the TEF and the use of splits data – are universities really using their splits data and is it driving change?
  • In the context of contact hours, Alex made the point that quality of contact is as important as the amount – students may want more help not more lectures.

HEPI are interested in further research and policy publications, using this data or other data – please contact policy@bournemouth.ac.uk if you would like to discuss this further.

Many thanks to all who attended and we look forward to continuing the dialogue on many of these issues.

 

Testing connected and autonomous vehicles: funding available

BU Challenges, Business Engagement, Funding opportunities

Image from fleetcarma.com

The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) – with Meridian Mobility and Innovate UK – has up to £30 million for projects that help make the UK the most effective connected and autonomous vehicle development ecosystem in the world.

Businesses and research organisations can apply into 2 competitions that support the testing of connected and autonomous vehicles and progress their development.

Connected vehicles data exchange

In the first competition, there is up to £5 million for one project that supports the sharing and trading of data generated by infrastructure, connected or autonomous vehicles or other third parties.

Autonomous highway, rural roads and parking

There is up to £25 million in the second competition. This is for up to 6 projects for facilities to support the testing of connected and autonomous vehicles for highways, rural roads and parking.

Key summary:

Deadline: 29 August 2018

Lead : UK-based business or research organisation

Available funding : Connected vehicles data exchange – up to £10m; Autonomous highway, rural roads and parking – between £1m and £20m

Project dates : before March 2019

Please see this link for full details of the call.

Funding opportunity – Smart tracking of waste across the UK

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities

The Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is investing up to £400,000 in projects that use digital technology to record and track the movement of waste through the economy. Funding for the competition is under SBRI (the Small Business Research Initiative), which aims to bring together government and businesses to find innovative solutions to public sector challenges.

This competition is in 2 phases. Phase 1 is for contracts of up to £80,000 to examine the feasibility of ideas. The best ideas could win a share of up to £1 million to develop and field test a prototype in a second phase.

Summary:

Deadline: 18 July 2018

Available funding: Phase 1 – up to £80,000; Phase 2 – up to £1m

Please see this link for full details of this call.

Funding opportunity – ISCF Next Generation Services Research Programme

BU Challenges, Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, innovation

Image from www.avaya.com

The ESRC has announced the Next Generation Services Research call under the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. Proposals of up to £1.25 million (100% full economic cost) are invited for interdisciplinary research grants, focused on working with businesses to identify the potential opportunities offered by the application of new technologies in the high value services sector.

This is a ‘Pioneer’ initiative that will focus in the first instance on the accountancy, legal services and insurance industries.

Please see below key summaries of this call:

Deadline : 4pm; 18 July 2018

Project start & end dates : between December 2018 and March 2021

Please see this link for full details of this call.

Apply for Innovate UK Robotics and AI for safer work residential and funding

BU Challenges, Business Engagement, Funding opportunities

Collaborative Decision Making

Innovate UK is offering opportunities for individuals to apply on behalf of their business to attend a 5-day residential innovation lab in September 2018. This innovation lab will allow delegates to work in teams to generate innovative and commercially-viable ideas in the following areas:

  • robotic structural capabilities
  • reformable structures
  • long-range and beyond visual line-of-sight operations
  • electronics, sensors and photonics for extreme environments
  • AI, autonomy and situational awareness
  • mission planning and risk management
  • systems engineering, including methodologies, verification and validation tools
  • security, reliability, safety and trust
  • collaborative robotics and AI systems
  • long endurance operations
  • modules that support increased dexterity
  • locomotion platforms that work extreme environments

In the second stage of the competition, teams that attended the innovation lab will have the opportunity to apply for a share of up to £15 million grant funding for their project.

Please see below a summary of the competition:

Deadline for application: 11 July 2018

Number of places available : 20 to 30

Eligibility: a business, academic, charity, public sector or research and technology organisation based in the UK and intend to carry out the project and exploit the results in the UK

Residential dates : 10 September 2014 – 14 September 2018

Second stage proposal award : £2m – £6m

Second stage proposal start date : January 2019

Please see this link for full details of this funding opportunity.

Digital addiction: how technology keeps us hooked

File 20180608 191974 6cyo5u.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1

There are a number of reasons why you can’t get away from your screen. shutterstock

By Dr Raian Ali, Bournemouth University; Dr Emily Arden-Close, Bournemouth University, and Dr John McAlaney, Bournemouth University

The World Health Organisation is to include “gaming disorder”, the inability to stop gaming, into the International Classification of Diseases. By doing so, the WHO is recognising the serious and growing problem of digital addiction. The problem has also been acknowledged by Google, which recently announced that it will begin focusing on “Digital Well-being”.

Although there is a growing recognition of the problem, users are still not aware of exactly how digital technology is designed to facilitate addiction. We’re part of a research team that focuses on digital addiction and here are some of the techniques and mechanisms that digital media use to keep you hooked.

Compulsive checking

Digital technologies, such as social networks, online shopping, and games, use a set of persuasive and motivational techniques to keep users returning. These include “scarcity” (a snap or status is only temporarily available, encouraging you to get online quickly); “social proof” (20,000 users retweeted an article so you should go online and read it); “personalisation” (your news feed is designed to filter and display news based on your interest); and “reciprocity” (invite more friends to get extra points, and once your friends are part of the network it becomes much more difficult for you or them to leave).

Some digital platforms use features normally associated with slot machines. Antoine Taveneaux/Wikimedia, CC BY

Technology is designed to utilise the basic human need to feel a sense of belonging and connection with others. So, a fear of missing out, commonly known as FoMO, is at the heart of many features of social media design.

Groups and forums in social media promote active participation. Notifications and “presence features” keep people notified of each others’ availability and activities in real-time so that some start to become compulsive checkers. This includes “two ticks” on instant messaging tools, such as Whatsapp. Users can see whether their message has been delivered and read. This creates pressure on each person to respond quickly to the other.

The concepts of reward and infotainment, material which is both entertaining and informative, are also crucial for “addictive” designs. In social networks, it is said that “no news is not good news”. So, their design strives always to provide content and prevent disappointment. The seconds of anticipation for the “pull to refresh” mechanism on smartphone apps, such as Twitter, is similar to pulling the lever of a slot machine and waiting for the win.

Most of the features mentioned above have roots in our non-tech world. Social networking sites have not created any new or fundamentally different styles of interaction between humans. Instead they have vastly amplified the speed and ease with which these interactions can occur, taking them to a higher speed, and scale.

Addiction and awareness

People using digital media do exhibit symptoms of behavioural addiction. These include salience, conflict, and mood modification when they check their online profiles regularly. Often people feel the need to engage with digital devices even if it is inappropriate or dangerous for them to do so. If disconnected or unable to interact as desired, they become preoccupied with missing opportunities to engage with their online social networks.

According to the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom, 15m UK internet users (around 34% of all internet users) have tried a “digital detox”. After being offline, 33% of participants reported feeling an increase in productivity, 27% felt a sense of liberation, and 25% enjoyed life more. But the report also highlighted that 16% of participants experienced the fear of missing out, 15% felt lost and 14% “cut-off”. These figures suggest that people want to spend less time online, but they may need help to do so.

Gaming disorder is to be recognised by the WHO.

At the moment, tools that enable people to be in control of their online experience, presence and online interaction remain very primitive. There seem to be unwritten expectations for users to adhere to social norms of cyberspace once they accept participation.

But unlike other mediums for addiction, such as alcohol, technology can play a role in making its usage more informed and conscious. It is possible to detect whether someone is using a phone or social network in an anxious, uncontrolled manner. Similar to online gambling, users should have available help if they wish. This could be a self-exclusion and lock-out scheme. Users can allow software to alert them when their usage pattern indicates risk.

The borderline between software which is legitimately immersive and software which can be seen as “exploitation-ware” remains an open question. Transparency of digital persuasion design and education about critical digital literacy could be potential solutions.

Raian Ali, Associate Professor in Computing and Informatics, Bournemouth University; Emily Arden-Close, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Bournemouth University, and John McAlaney, Principal Academic in Psychology, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Innovate UK Grant Support Opportunity

Funding opportunities, Grants Academy, innovation, Knowledge Exchange

Dear colleague

We understand that Innovate UK will be announcing a Digital Health Technology Catalyst (DHTC) fund competition in the Autumn (likely October). The sums of money available are likely to be significant (last call was looking for projects between £300K and £1M) and of course competition will be intense. The competition needs to be led by a Small to Medium Enterprise (SME), but these companies will need to partner with another organisation and this can be the University. We believe that locally we have the links to industry (SMEs), capability and expertise to be contenders for this award.

Attached below are the 10 questions that Innovate UK regularly ask in their applications.  We are giving you advance warning so that you could put yourselves on the front foot in the application process and give you time to seek and partner with an SME.

We would like to support you and have in place support from Dr Frank Ratcliff and Kevin Brooks of the Wessex AHSN for up to three to five bids which, based on their experience, have the ingredients for success. Kevin will be available to provide guidance throughout the application process and carry out a comprehensive check of your application, against the funder’s criteria, before the applications are submitted.

To registered your interest, and for us to check eligibility, there is a short expression of interest (EOI) form attached below for you to complete. Please send your EOIs to Audrey Dixon (adixon@bournemouth.ac.uk ) by Noon on Friday 29th June 2018.

We are told that the criteria for Round 2 of the DHTC grant is unlikely to change. For your information, and to check the eligibility and scope of your proposed project, click here to view details of the last (now closed) DHTC Round 1

DHTC Expression of Interest Application Form IUK 10 Application Questions

IUK 10 Application Questions

Calling all PGRs – Postgraduate Research Community Questionnaire (1 Week Left)

PG research

The Doctoral College is conducting research into postgraduate researcher communities and we would love to hear our PGRs views.

Thank you to everyone who has completed the questionnaire so far.

The questionnaire is open for just one more week and should only take 10-15 minutes to complete (no log-in required).

>>>>> Click here to access the questionnaire <<<<<<

Drinks voucher available for all that complete the questionnaire.

If you have any questions please contact Natalie (nstewart@bournemouth.ac.uk) or Clare (ccutler@bournemouth.ac.uk).