Continuity and change with engaged research

Posted on Thursday, 3 December 2015 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Embedding strategy, celebrating excellence, transforming practice
In July 2013, colleagues and I at the Open University (OU), UK started this blog and called it Engaging Research. As the University’s Champion for Public Engagement with Research at that time it fell to me to write the first post. I named this after the multi-disciplinary project the small team and I were working on, ‘An open research university’.

In that post I posed a ‘tongue in cheek’ question, “If you’re the University’s Champion for Public Engagement with Research can you tell me how many people it takes to change a university’s research culture?” My answer was a play on an old joke, “I don’t know at the moment, but I do know that those involved really have to want to change.” More than two years on from that first blog post, I can give you a more serious answer to the same question.

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Towards a scholarship of engagement

Posted on Wednesday, 11 November 2015 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Ideas about a scholarship of engagement are increasingly generating interest among academics, across the higher education sector, and within stakeholder groups and user communities. New challenges and opportunities are being addressed as academics work with peers, and sometimes also with user communities, to envisage, theorise and instantiate new places, spaces and methods for public engagement.

In so doing, scholars are connecting with the engagement agenda as they work to identify, and increasingly to assess, more effective ways of generating, representing, circulating and debating knowledge in the public sphere.

In exploring this changing culture colleagues and I at the Open University organised an Engaging Research seminar series (for further details, see below). You can view the archived recordings of the 12 seminars in this series at the following location: http://weblab.open.ac.uk/catalyst/per-seminars

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The battle for engaged research

Posted on Monday, 7 September 2015 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

I’ve long admired the work of my colleague Professor Martin Weller. Studies conducted in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), in particular research exploring the practices of digital scholarship, were central to the development of the Open University’s proposal to RCUK to become one of eight Public Engagement with Research Catalyst universities. Since that earlier work Martin has further explored ideas about openness in higher education, culminating in his latest book, The battle for open: How Openness Won and Why it Doesn’t Feel Like Victory.

We’ve recently completed the work of the OU’s RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research (PER) Catalyst, An Open Research University, publishing our final report (Holliman, et al. 2015). As such, members of the OU’s PER Catalyst project team and I have spent recent months consolidating the learning from our project with the aim of sharing lessons learned and resources with other universities, including the RCUK Catalyst Seed Funded universities.

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Engaging Environmental Research: developing productive partnerships with end-users

Posted on Wednesday, 6 May 2015 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, The Open University

In Spring 2015 we offered up to 30 NERC-funded postgraduate researchers (through the CENTA DTP), supervisors, and early-career researchers the opportunity to work on developing productive partnerships with the end-users of their environmental research, and to communicate the economic and social significance of their work.

Over the five days of this course NERC-funded researchers worked with me and Dr Clare Warren to explore conceptual issues, including: who are the end-users for your research, who could they be, and how do you best present your work in the public sphere to encourage end-users to work with you?

The researchers also developed and practiced new skills under the supervision of Dr Janet Sumner, Gerard Giorgi-Coll and Thomas Ryan, such as working with recording equipment, producing pieces-to-camera & editing footage.

What follows is a description of the first of three five-day workshops, which took place in January 2015. The post has been authored by Clare Lawson, Jonathan Moles, Bethan Parkes, Alan Radbourne and Kerry Reid. The post includes links to some of the videos the researchers produced. If you’d like to view the other videos you’ll find the all here.

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Celebrating excellence in engaged research

Posted on Tuesday, 3 March 2015 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, The Open University

The winners of the Open University’s 2015 Engaging Research Award Scheme were announced in early February 2015.

The scheme was devised as part of the Open University’s RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research Catalyst. It was designed to find and celebrate high-quality engaged research at the OU, demonstrating the different ways that researchers meaningfully interact with various stakeholders over any or all stages of a research process, from issue formulation, the production or co-creation of new knowledge, to knowledge evaluation and dissemination.

As the Chair of the Assessment Panel, I was extremely grateful to the six judges for their careful assessments of the entries. I was particularly delighted that two of the winners for the 2014 Engaging Research Award Scheme, Thea Herodotou and Natalia Kucirkova, agreed to act as judges for this 2015 competition.

2015 Engaging Research Award Winners: L-R: Richard Holliman, Paul Stenner, Katy Jordan, Graham Pike, Rosa Hoekstra, Francesca Benatti (on behalf of Elton Barker), Alan Bassindale, Verina Waights, Martin Weller, Cindy Kerawalla, Saskia van Manen and Fiona McKerlie

2015 Engaging Research Award Winners and Highly Commended Entries: L-R: Richard Holliman, Paul Stenner, Katy Jordan, Graham Pike, Rosa Hoekstra, Francesca Benatti (on behalf of Elton Barker), Alan Bassindale, Verina Waights, Martin Weller, Cindy Kerawalla, Saskia van Manen and Fiona McKerlie. Photo: Chris Valentine.

The standard of the entries to this round of the scheme was very high, with the judging panel awarding prizes to three winners of the scheme as well as recognizing six further highly commended entries.

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Walton High students show star qualities

Posted on Tuesday, 5 August 2014 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Students from Walton High, a school in Milton Keynes, have been finding out that the sky is definitely not the limit when it comes to research at The Open University (OU).

In late July, as part of their digital media production course, ten BTEC students visited the OU campus to find out more about its work on Europe’s comet-chasing spacecraft Rosetta – the world’s first mission to land on a comet.

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Assessing seed funding applications

Posted on Wednesday, 19 March 2014 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, Chair of the Review Panel

Evidencing Engaged Research: The closing date for applications has passed and we are not accepting further applications.

Contact
Dr Richard Holliman, Chair of the Review Panel.
Fiona McKerlie, Secretary to the Review Panel.

Purpose of this call: To support active researchers in the generation and systematic collection of evidence of the impacts from engaged research, demonstrating effects, changes and/or mutual benefits to those participating.

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A shared purpose for engaging research

Posted on Friday, 7 March 2014 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, OU Champion for Public Engagement with Research

Leadership; Mission; Communication
Champion’s blog; star date 2014.03.10 (in effect, an update on the first post on this blog, ‘An open research university‘).

Nearly two years of the mission completed; 14 months of funding left. “Where do we boldly go from here?”

I was interviewed late last year by Lucian Hudson, the OU’s Director of Communications, to explore this question. We also discussed progress with the core mission of the OU’s Public Engagement with Research Catalyst.

You can see the results of our discussion in the video below. If you’d prefer to read the text of the interview, select transcript.

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Plan for diversity and inclusion

Posted on Tuesday, 4 March 2014 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, The Open University

Teamwork is key to successful planning
When we’re producing courses at the Open University we tend to work in teams; many of them are multi-discplinary and almost all of them combine academics with other forms of professional expertise (e.g. editors and media professionals). For example, the last course I chaired (with the catchy code, SH804) involved more than 70 people during the production phase (including academics, media professionals, editors, librarians and web developers).

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to work with some excellent colleagues in various course teams. You might expect me to say that. But it’s not always straightforward working as a social scientist in a Faculty of Science. One of the many colleagues I’ve really valued working with is Professor Simon Kelley. We worked together as part of a larger course team on Science in Context.

The team who organised and delivered the Science Matters School Lectures.

Back row, l-r: Janet Goss, Diane Ford, Gareth Davies, Andrew Norton, Janice Ansine, Simon Kelley and Tim Blackman. Front row, l-r: Frazer Bird, Clare Warren and Richard Holliman. Photo: Kate Bradshaw

Serendipity meets planning for diversity and inclusion
Spin forwards several years: I’d been working on the Engaging Opportunities project for about nine months when we began to think seriously about organising the first of the three annual lectures that we’d promised RCUK we would deliver.

A conversation with Simon Kelley at the regular departmental coffee morning led to a collaboration with colleagues from the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance, Centre for Physical and Environmental Sciences (CEPSAR), eSTEeM, the OU’s AV team and our Research, Scholarship and Quality Unit.
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Happy 3rd Birthday: RCUK Public Engagement with Research Concordat

Posted on Friday, 29 November 2013 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, The Open University

Public engagement with research has come a long way since 2000. The pace of change has quickened significantly following the establishment of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), the completion of the Beacons for Public Engagement programme, the embedding of research impact within Research Council grant applications and the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014), and the 2010 publication of the RCUK’s Concordat for Engaging the Public with Research.

Whilst each of these developments was significant, the publication of the RCUK Concordat three years ago was a watershed. In effect, its four principles were a mandate for embedding public engagement within the UK’s research culture. To celebrate the third anniversary of the Concordat’s publication RCUK have published another booklet called Inspiration to Engage.
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Engaging Research

An Open Research University: Embedding public engagement within the research culture of the OU

Author Archives: Richard Holliman

Continuity and change with engaged research

Towards a scholarship of engagement

The battle for engaged research

Engaging Environmental Research: developing productive partnerships with end-users

Celebrating excellence in engaged research

Walton High students show star qualities

Assessing seed funding applications

A shared purpose for engaging research

Plan for diversity and inclusion

Happy 3rd Birthday: RCUK Public Engagement with Research Concordat