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BRAD can help you to develop your research career

BU research

What is the aim of BRAD?  The BU Researcher/Academic Development (BRAD) programme is a tailor made framework of development sessions for you, our BU researchers, based on the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF). This holistic framework provides professional and personal development in the key areas of:

A. Knowledge & Intellectual Abilities

B. Personal Effectiveness

C. Research Governance & Organization

D. Engagement, Influence & Impact

How did we consult you in creating BRAD ? A poll was posted on our blog to explore which training areas you would like us to host and this was followed by an online survey to explore the training needs of early career researchers (ECRs) in particular. The results concluded you would like training in a wide range of development areas from specific methodology to an academic career path. Feedback also clearly said sessions should be about two hours and that Wednesdays were the preferred date for sessions and the framework follows this structure. There are a few sessions which run for longer than two hours and this is because of the subject matter.

What kind of sessions are we running? The programme comprises of a wide range of facilitated development sessions held on campus (by internal and external presenters), online research modules from Epigeum (so you can learn in your own time) and the Vitae’s RDF. The facilitated sessions cover everything from research skills to personal effectiveness, from using SPSS to creating impact through your research. The online training covers a range of topics from getting published to managing your research career which you can undertake at your own time. You can identify which sessions to attend by undertaking the simple ‘My Academic Development Needs: Self-Assessment’ (MADNSA) or use Vitae’s jazzy Excel version which is more detailed.  You can read case studies of real academics to see how using the planner based on this assessment has helped transform their careers if you still need a little convincing to complete this and also the top 10 tipsfrom researchers on using the framework.All academic staff at BU have access to this programme and you can attend whichever sessions you are interested in; you don’t have to attend the whole programme. For facilitated sessions, just book through the Staff Development webpages and for online modules, simply log into myBU  and search the BRAD community to view all courses and to get started!

Who can be part of BRAD? Any BU academic member of staff can sign up to the BRAD programme; there is no commitment required as to the number of sessions you undertake. We simply want to keep a record of those who are taking part in some of the BRAD facilitated and online sessions, so we can get your feedback on how useful they were.  You will be automatically added to the list when you sign up for a session with Staff Development.

Bournemouth University represented at the Launch of International Sport Coaching Framework in Durban, South Africa

BU research, REF Subjects, Research themes, Uncategorized

Lecturer in Sport Psychology and Coaching Sciences, Emma Kavanagh was recently present at the launch of the International Sport Coaching Framework at the International Council for Coaching Excellence (ICCE) 9th global coaching conference in Durban, South Africa.  This marked a worldwide initiative to launch the ICCE global coaching strategy and standardise the practice of sports coaching across the world.

 

Whilst attending the conference as a delegate, Emma also presented a research paper in collaboration with Dr Abbe Brady from the University of Gloucestershire entitled “Humanization in High Performance Sport: Introducing a Value-based Framework for Coaches and Practitioners”.  This paper provided a vocabulary for articulating one of the foundations of the international coaching framework; creating an athlete centred coaching environment.

 

The paper was well received by both national and international delegates including some of the world’s leading experts in the field of sport and coaching sciences.  The paper was described as an area of fruitful and exciting opportunity for future research in coaching and performance. This has further enhanced Bournemouth Universities reputation as an emerging centre of innovative research in sport and coaching sciences.  In addition the conference has provided opportunity for further external collaborations with a number of national and international partners.

Fusion Funding for Entrepreneurial Education: Co-creation of market reports for industry

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion

This project involves students and staff co-creating research reports that will be sold to industry.  Students will undertake research as part of their Academic and Professional Research unit assessment and upon completion the most insightful and commercially viable student work will be repurposed with a member of academic staff to ensure it is market-ready.  In repurposing their work students will conduct paid work, via the Creative Enterprise Bureau’s existing model.  Workshops will be hosted by the academic staff involved in each of the reports in order to facilitate the application of market insights more specifically to the clients’ own businesses.

This project fuses education, research and enterprise.  It implements a new model of entrepreneurial education, fully integrates the Creative Enterprise Bureau into teaching and, will develop the enterprise activity of the Corporate and Marketing Communications department.

The project will be self-sustaining, as revenue generated from report sales will fund the following year’s projects.

We also plan to conduct research to evaluate the implementation and success of the project from student, industry and academic staff perspectives, leading to the publication of articles in HE journals regarding the topical issue of entrepreneurial education.

eBU PGT & PGR drop in sessions

BU research, PG research, Publishing, Research news

Publishing should be high on the agenda of any early career scholar, and PGTs and PGRs should feel no different. For those who are concerned or intimidated by the harsh academic publishing world, eBU is here to help.

eBU: Online Journal is the new online working paper journal for the BU community. Putting your work ‘out there’ can be daunting. eBU is particularly useful for early career scholars, PGTs and PGRs who may wish and have something to publish, but have not yet dipped their toes into the world of academic peer reviewed publishing.

eBU works on the basis of immediate publication (subject to an initial quality check) and open peer review. Once published on the internal site, we aim to upload reviews within 3 weeks. Authors are then encouraged to use the comments to aid publication in an external journal. Alternatively, authors also have the option of publishing on the external eBU site. Please note that only using eBU as a forum for internal peer review (with the intention to publish externally – which we encourage!) WILL NOT ENDANGER FURTHER PUBLICATION.

I am holding drop in sessions (aimed at PGTs and PGRs – but anyone is welcome!) for anyone who wishes to discuss eBU further. These will be held on Talbot Campus:

Monday 7th October 11am – 2pm PG30d

Tuesday 8th October 11am – 2pm PG30d

And on the Lansdowne:

Wednesday 9th 11am – 2pm EBC ground floor cafe

To access eBU, when on campus simply type ‘ebu’ into your web browser address bar.

 

Coming soon – new staff profile pages

Guidance

BRIANWe are pleased to be able to announce that the new staff profile application should be released next week.

There are staff profile pages for all academic staff and some other staff including a number of PGRs.  The staff profile pages are the method we use to expose information from your BRIAN profile to the wider world.  As such it is an important platform to explain who you are, what you have done and what you are currently working on.

The current staff profile page application has been problematic.  The chief complaint has been that some publications do not appear in the profile and those that do are sometimes not correctly categorised.

We have worked with the development team in IT to create a new application that remedies these faults and also provides pages that look crisp and professional.

There are many benefits from the new pages.  For example, the pages allow for much improved searching including partial matches and ‘did you mean?’ functionality.  Users can also search for anyone linked to a research theme or keyword.  Searches can be undertaken for publications.

We plan to migrate to the new pages next week.  We just have some final tweaks to finish before the application is fully ready and the launch can be scheduled.

Other than ensuring your BRIAN profile is up to date and complies with the minumim content suggestions, there is nothing that BRIAN users need to do.

We will explain some of the other benenfits of the new pages in following posts.

Reminder – CEMP open meeting this Thursday

BU research, Uncategorized

    Reminder about this Thursday’s meeting which is an open invitation for people to come along, have a coffee and tell us how we can support collaborative approaches to pedagogic research & innovation.

The background:

This academic year CEMP will continue to publish a fortnightly research & innovation funding bulletin via this blog, like so:  CEMP bulletin 26.9.13

The Research & Innovation meetings will also continue, but we want to invite colleagues from the rest of the Media School and across BU to tell us how we can increase engagement and collaboration in all aspects of pedagogic / educational research and innovation related to media / technology.

Previously, the model has been like this –

The bulletin is posted on a Thursday – this contains information about funding calls and also monitors live projects and reports on the outcomes of all bids.

The next Thursday, we meet to discuss the calls in the bulletin and report on bids in progress.

The next Thursday, the updated bulletin is posted

….and so on.

So far, we’ve been successful in one of our two key objectives – increasing CEMP bidding activity, but less successful in the other – developing collaboration with other people in BU, either in response to the funding calls in the bulletin or to try to match peoples’ ideas for projects / innovation to funding opportunities. This second objective is a service / function CEMP can offer to the University, and we’d like more colleagues to access this.

So – we’d like to review how we do this, in order to get better at the second objective, and to this end the first R&I meeting of this year is an open forum and everyone is invited to either come along and contribute to the discussion or to add a comment to this post if you have ideas but can’t make the meeting.

Meeting details:

Thursday 26th September 10-12

CEMP’s new office (CAGO2) – with tea, coffee and pastries!!!

Key issues for discussion:

  • How can CEMP support people in developing research / innovation projects?
  • What are the structural obstacles and how can we overcome them?

When we’ve got everyone’s ideas / requests for how to proceed, we’ll decide how to go ahead.

I hope we’ll see you there or read your ideas on the blog.

Julian

BRIAN update completed successfully

Guidance

BRIANYesterday’s upgrade of BRIAN was completed successfully.  The system is now fully usable.

Updated guides and videos will be available soon.  In the interim, if you have any queries, please email BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Details of grants can now be recorded in BRIAN.  This document explains how to manage grant information: BRIAN – Managing grants – Sep 13

The research themes have been updated too.  As a result, there is a new theme available ‘Ageing, Society and Dementia’ which you may wish to add to your profile, if applicable.  It would be good if you could check your choice of research themes in BRIAN to ensure they still reflect your interests.

We are now working on the release of the new staff profile pages and will tell you more about this shortly.

Desperate for uninterrupted quality time on your grant application? Come to the Residential Research Retreat!

BU research

The Research Design Service South West (RDS SW) is offering a unique opportunity to researchers in health and social care across the South West of England.

The Residential Research Retreat provides an opportunity for research teams to develop high quality research proposals suitable for submission to national peer-reviewed funding schemes. The aim of the Retreat is to provide the environment and support to promote rapid progress in developing proposals over a relatively short time period. The Retreat is open to health professionals and academic partners working within the South West. 

At the Retreat you will be supported by a range of academic experts while developing your research proposal. Away from the workplace, you will work intensively on your proposal, while learning how to maximise its chances for successfully securing a grant. You will learn how to develop your idea into a viable and first class research proposal and experience research project planning at a professional level.

A delegate from this year’s Retreat said, “This has been an extremely valuable exercise and has really helped build an understanding of what is expected from NIHR funded projects. In order to ensure that new researchers are able to make feasible, rigorous, well-designed bids for funding, this week is essential.”

The Retreat will be held at the Ammerdown Conference Centre, near Bath in Somerset from 1 June to 6 June 2014 inclusive. To win a place on the Retreat, applications should be submitted by 1pm on Friday 17th January 2014.  Applications will be reviewed competitively and places awarded to the most promising team proposals. The application and further information is available at http://www.rds-sw.nihr.ac.uk/rrr.htm.

Don’t forget, your local branch of the Research Design Service is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) on the 5th floor of Royal London House. Feel free to pop in and see us or send us an email.

CEMP Fellows? A Proposal for Fostering Innovative Education Research at BU

BU Challenges, BU research, Fusion

Many media studies professionals engaged in learning innovation first get introduced to Bournemouth University through CEMP, the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice. From attending annual summits to publishing in the Media Education Research Journal, before joining BU I was already connected to this unique community characterised by creativity, sharing and mentorship. Once I started working at BU I quickly realised that educational researchers interested in media and technology were not just in CEMP. From the School of Tourism to DEC, inspiring educational research can be found across BU.

As the Fusion vision expands and EdD programme grows, the time seems ripe to further foster innovative education research at BU, to use CEMP to bring our educational researchers together. Yet, as any of us who’ve scampered around to meet a grant deadline knows all too well, network building and collaborative bidding requires workload time and institutional support. This got some of us thinking about ways we might be able to foster educational research through CEMP. Borrowing a best practice employed at many research centres around the world, we asked ourselves: What if CEMP had internal fellows?

These CEMP Fellows could be culled from BU’s existing educational research community. Provided dedicated time in their schedules to meet together, they could share their previous scholarship and develop new collaborative projects. CEMP could create annual or bi-annual themes to guide this knowledge exchange and facilitate initiatives, offering a programmed series of meetings and events. For example, CEMP might run a Fellow programme on a topic like ‘Games and Education,’ bringing together researchers exploring the use of educational gaming across all schools.  As evidence that these fellows already exist amongst us, just two weeks ago at the VS Games conference hosted at BU by Dr. Christos Gatzidis and Dr. Jian Zhang of DEC, we saw BU participants from Tourism, the Centre for Digital Entertainment, Animation, Corporate Communication and more. Together we shared innovations in educational gaming.  Could CEMP Fellows be a way forward for fostering fusion?

An Appetite for Research in the Undergraduate Population

Uncategorized

For the past four years we have run Research Assistantship Schemes in the Psychology Research Centre. These schemes, both voluntary and paid (fusion-funded), have lead to both expected and unexpected benefits. Read on to find out more.

The 2nd year Psychology undergraduate voluntary Research Assistantship Scheme received 45 applications this year which represented 25% of the eligible year group. This represents an almost 50% increase on the year before. Prior to formalising the scheme numbers were much lower than that. Formalising the scheme has helped reveal an amazing appetite for research in the undergraduate population, but our schemes have had further reaching benefits. One benefit has been that our accrediting body, The British Psychological Society, has commended the RA scheme. We have also learned that some students applied to our undergraduate course because of the RA scheme.

The related Fusion-funded Research Assistantship Summer Scheme received 37 applications for the 7 paid positions. Two of the positions were advertised to completed 3rd year students. Advertised as prestigious positions and a potential platform to MSc level study, all of the 3rd year applicants went on to apply for our research MSc in Lifespan Neuropsychology. This year the number of BU students recruited to the MSc has doubled (acting as somewhat of a buffer against the sector-typical drop in external applications). Furthermore, 66% of the unsuccessful applicants volunteered as RAs with us over the summer instead of missing out. Some of these applicants joined our RA schemes in their second years as volunteers meaning that we have provided them with a pathway for research training from early in their degree through to MSc; for some this has lead to their names’ inclusion on submitted papers.

For the first time this year the summer scheme positions sought sponsorship. Non-financial sponsorship came from three local charities alongside which the RAs worked giving them further invaluable experience. At least one of these is now considering providing financial sponsorship for summer 2014; we hope to introduce matched- or fully-funded sponsorship options in the near future. In sum, the RA positions are a useful route route to engagement with local, external bodies and could entice first-time funders, representing first-step funding, and potentially leading to funding for matched- or perhaps fully-funded PhD positions and beyond.

The RA schemes have been running in the Psychology Research Centre for four years. Increasing formalisation has led some important benefits for students and staff and revealed an appetite for for research in the undergraduate population that previously could only have been guessed at. For sure, some of this represents the desire for more general experience for CVs but most are genuinely interested in the outcome of the research. Students learn the difficulties involved in research and begin to better understand and appreciate what academics spend their time doing when they are not teaching. Staff are learning more about the utility of involving fresh, eager minds in their research. If wielded properly, RA schemes have the potential to meet student demands, increase MSc level study here at BU and as a consequence prevent the loss of our best students, and help build future researchers. We are happy to report all of these outcomes in the four years the schemes have been running. We aim to continue the formalisation and offer Certificates for newly defined stages of Research Assistantship, which involves combining our up until now separate voluntary and paid schemes. We have spoken to at least one head of group who is interested in porting this formalised scheme to their discipline and to allowing our RAs to interact in the hope of fermenting interdisciplinary discussion and research and the undergraduate level. We hope that this blog entry will spark more interest.

BRIAN being upgraded today

Guidance

BRIANA quick reminder that BRIAN is being upgraded today.  The upgrade starts at 10.00 so please do not use the application after that time today. 

The work is scheduled to take most of the day.  We expect BRIAN to be available tomorrow morning.

 

 

Dissent and protest – new directions for public relations

BU research

Dissent and Protest Public Relations is an initiative by the PR Research Group in the Media School which aims to help develop new directions for exploring both practice and theory.

A series of seminars launched this initiative in late 2012, and the global PR Conversations website has now published papers from three of the four contributors (including myself) who approached the topic from different perspectives.

The papers (click here for pdf) have been published to stimulate discussion around the terms dissent PR and protest PR, and whether they can, and should, be applied to current, recent and past PR happenings.

We are hoping to hear thoughts about whether or not the concepts should be developed further and views on considering a wider perspective on public relations than the normal idea that it is employed primarily within organisations and so is often critiqued as a right-wing, or at least, establishment, method of communications.

Please comment here or join the conversation at PR Conversations: http://www.prconversations.com/index.php/2013/09/dissent-and-protest-new-directions-for-public-relations/

5 exciting upgrades to the Online Ethics Checklist

Research Ethics

You spoke and we listened…the release of the updated Online Ethics Checklist is now live! Below is a list of 5 exciting changes to the checklist:

1. Document attachment function – that’s right, rather than emailing your participant information sheet, consent form, questionnaire, risk assessment, etc. to your supervisor/ethics representative, now you’ll be able to attach the documents through the Online Ethics Checklist!

2. PDF of what to expect to see on the checklist – researchers will be able to review this document prior to going through the actual checklist to ensure they are aware of the information they will need to provide in order to speed up the ethical review process!

3. The ability to view Open or Submitted checklists as a PDF prior to approval – researchers will now be able to produce a draft version of the ethics checklist in the instance they are working with multiple partners or multiple schools to ensure all parties are on the same page when it comes to research ethics!

4. A link to the Health Research Authority Decision Tool – researchers who aren’t sure if their research requires external approval (i.e. via a NHS Research Ethics Committee) can use this decision tool to know if they should apply for external approval.

5. Activity trail – supervisors and Ethics Representatives will now be able to see the record of activity between themselves and researchers, which will ensure an audit trail is available in the instance questions arise regarding the ethical review and approval process.

If you have any questions about the above upgrades or anything else regarding the Online Ethics Checklist, please get in touch with Julia Hastings Taylor.