An excellent question, posed by the HeLF folks, to which the only possible answer is a resounding ‘yes’. But that would make for a very short webinar, so we discussed the issues around this too. Obviously a very interesting session for me, as I have been trying to push my career in this direction over the past few years, as you can probably tell, and the work I’ve been doing on Studiosity has afforded me an excellent opportunity to do so.
We had a good discussion on the nature of research and the differences between research and evaluation. The latter, generally, being something which is done for internal purposes and audiences only, while research is likely of wider interest and therefore there is value in sharing via relevant publications. Within our community, however, there may be barriers which prevent, or make it difficult for professional services staff to publish. One colleague mentioned a publication, not named to protect the guilty, which charged for publication, but gave steep discounts to academic contracted staff, but none if you happened to have ‘professional services’ on your contract.
We also talked a lot about ethics committees, which again can be hard to access, with another colleague reporting that they weren’t even allowed to submit something to an ethics panel, while at another institution professional service staff were kicked out of their ethics board because it was felt to be having a negative impact on their REF submission.
That all sounds rather bleak, but there are solutions to these problems. Some people reported having nominal 0.2 academic contracts to get over institutional barriers, while others are running their own internal ethics boards. It was a very good discussion this morning, and something which is going to become a series, so I will be learning and writing more on this.
Relevant related reading: Defining the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, by Ann M. Gansemer-Topf, Laila I. McCloud, and John M. Braxton.
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