Navigating pathways to research impact

Posted on Thursday, 22 November 2018 by Richard Holliman

Pathways to Excellence in Public Engagement (STFC, 2018).

Recent STFC-sponsored research explored how physical science researchers in the UK are responding to the requirements to plan for, assess, monitor and report impact (Holliman et al. 2018).

The STFC-sponsored research found that the current system of Pathways to Impact Planning is struggling to consistently deliver rigorous, well-resourced programmes of impact-generating activity, including public engagement.

Upstream planning for pathways is a key requirement for improving the overall quality of the peer review system that underpins impact. How might this be achieved?

‘Navigating pathways to research impact’ is a short video offering entry-level advice on how to plan upstream for Pathways to Impact within the context of an application for research funding.

To access a copy of the transcript for the video, select: Navigating pathways to research impact’ is a short video offering entry-level advice on how to plan for Pathways to Impact (Transcript).

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Pathways to excellence in public engagement: A noble ‘PEACE prize’

Posted on Tuesday, 23 October 2018 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University.

Over recent years, STFC’s Public Engagement Team has undertaken a series of strategic reviews to better understand and refine the systems used to create, support, and evaluate high-quality public engagement in the STFC community. (STFC is the Science and Technology Facilities Council.) The most recent of these is called Pathways to Excellence in Public Engagement.

A Catalyst for PEACE
Given my previous role as the operational lead on the OU’s Public Engagement with Research (PER) Catalyst, An Open Research University, I was delighted to be involved in two of these important reviews.

In the first instance, I was a member of the review team that produced the PEACE Report (Public Engagement: Attitudes, Culture and Ethos).

Public Engagement: Attitudes, Culture and Ethos (STFC, 2016).

This review uncovered STFC researchers’ perceptions of the challenges and opportunities they faced in the course of balancing engagement activities alongside their scientific and engineering careers (see ‘Give PEACE a chance’).

Together with the findings from the PER Catalyst programme (NCCPE, 2016), the PEACE report answered some significant questions in relation to how researchers are adapting to the routine requirements to plan for, enact and evidence impacts derived from publicly-funded research.

Collectively, these pieces of work also raised other important questions, not least in relation to whether Pathways to Impact Planning in its current form was consistently delivering rigorous, well-resourced programmes of impact-generating activity.

Pathways to Excellence in Public Engagement

It is in this context that I was asked by the STFC Public Engagement Team to lead a review to explore these important issues. The recently published PEPE Report (Pathways to Excellence in Public Engagement) Report is the result of this review.

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The appeal of online citizen science

Posted on Monday, 2 July 2018 by Vickie Curtis

Dr Vickie Curtis, University of Glasgow

Can projects increase the inclusivity of scientific research?

Citizen science is a collective term for projects that engage both professional scientists and non-specialists in the process of gathering, evaluating or computing scientific data.

The number and scope of citizen science projects has increased dramatically over the past two decades – much of this is a direct result of developments in information and communication technology (ICT) and the Internet.

Some citizen science projects are now conducted entirely via the Internet and participants help to analyse large sets of data that have been provided by scientists.

How and why people participate in such projects are the subjects of my new book Online Citizen Science and the Widening of Academia.

Some projects have attracted thousands of registered participants, leading some to claim that they open up scientific research and ‘democratise’ science. But how inclusive are they in reality?

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Can citizen inquiry be inclusive?

Posted on Monday, 7 May 2018 by Jess Carr

Jessica Carr, The Open University.

Are people with learning disabilities regularly excluded from decision-making processes which may have a direct impact on them?

I’ve recently published research that explores this important issue (Carr, 2018), with the aim of contributing to wider discussions about how we build capacity to ensure that citizens have access to, and agency within, research (Holliman, 2017).

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Learning from Engaging Opportunities

Posted on Friday, 20 April 2018 by Richard Holliman

Engaging Opportunities (Holliman et al. 2018)

We have recently published the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’ (Holliman et al. 2018).

Funded as one of 12 by RCUK, our project involved a School-University Partnership (SUPI) between the Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance.

Informed by action research, our partnership was designed to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for effective school-university engagement with research.

Over four years our project team created engaging opportunities for 11 schools and more than 6,577 people within Milton Keynes. Students and teachers engaged with authentic practices of contemporary and inspiring research in a range of academic disciplines.

Through this work we offering opportunities to participate in mutual learning and develop relevant and useful skills and competencies in how to access, assess, analyse and respond to contemporary research.

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Engaged research as a route to epistemic justice

Posted on Thursday, 14 December 2017 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University.

I’ve recently had a paper published as part of a collection that explores professionalisation in science communication (Trench, 2017). In the paper, I review the purposes, definitions and criteria designed to embed ‘engaged research’ as a strategic priority with universities, and explores some of the challenges of implementation (Holliman, 2017).

I argue that surveys of academics have shown various understandings of, and attitudes to, the practices of engaged research, but also impediments to realising the aspirations it expresses.

Drawing on my experience as the academic lead for engaged research at the Open University, I go on to explore questions of professionalisation, for example, through training, support mechanisms and measures of recognition for engaged research.

I conclude the paper by arguing that, if done well, engaged research can promote epistemic justice. So what is epistemic justice, and how can engaged research deliver what Medvecky (2017) calls ‘fairness in knowing’.

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How can you plan effectively for engaged research?

Posted on Thursday, 7 December 2017 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University.

How can you plan effectively for engaged research? What are some of the common pitfalls, and what counts as best practice?

Colleagues and I from the Open University and Denbigh School in Milton Keynes recently published a chapter in a new edited collection (Kucirkova and Quinlan, 2017) where we offer practical advice on how to respond to this important question in a pragmatic way (Holliman et al. 2017).

The framework has been designed to be applicable to any researcher and discipline, and to be adaptable to all forms of engaged research.
The chapter documents a worked example of the framework, involving an activity mediated via digital tools and technologies and involving scientists, an educational technologist, several teachers, 25 sixth-form students, and an evaluation researcher.

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Citizen inquiry: Synthesizing science and inquiry learning

Posted on Wednesday, 1 November 2017 by Christothea Herodotou

Christothea Herodotou, Mike Sharples and Eileen Scanlon, The Open University.

Citizen science or crowdsourcing has gained increasing popularity in recent years with web-based platform such as Zooniverse and iSpot scaffolding interactions between scientists and members of the public.

Little emphasis has been given to the educational benefits of citizen science, in particular for volunteers or members of the public who wish to contribute to citizen science activities.

Citizen inquiry: Synthesizing science and inquiry learning, recently published by Routledge, is the first edited collection of its kind to draw the emphasis on inquiry-based learning from participation in citizen science activities.

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Online citizen science: social technologies in use

Posted on Monday, 2 October 2017 by Richard Holliman

Vickie Curtis, Richard Holliman, Ann Jones and Eileen Scanlon

Colleagues and I have recently had a chapter published in an edited collection (Curtis et al., 2017).

Led by Dr Vickie Curtis, and reporting findings from her PhD thesis (Curtis, 2015), this chapter explores processes of learning within online citizen science projects.

In particular, the chapter presents evidence as to why citizen scientists register on projects, but also, crucially, what makes them stay and become productive members of a distributed research project.

Social technologies in use
In the chapter we argue that digital technologies are profoundly social in use. They are developed and defined by participants who learn through iterative processes of participation.

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Developing productive partnerships with end-users

Posted on Wednesday, 1 February 2017 by Richard Holliman

Richard Holliman and Clare Warren, The Open University. Photo: Michael Francis.

We’ve just published an open access paper in a new journal called Research for all. (Scroll down for further details about the new journal.)

In the paper, we discuss how we supported future scholars of engaged research through a training programme that included some preparatory and follow-up activities, combined with a week-long residential element (Holliman and Warren, 2017).

In the paper we acknowledge that researchers in the UK are taking on new roles and responsibilities to meet the requirements of an expanded agenda for generating and evidencing social and economic impacts from research.

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Engaging Research

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

Category Archives: Publications

Navigating pathways to research impact

Pathways to excellence in public engagement: A noble ‘PEACE prize’

The appeal of online citizen science

Can citizen inquiry be inclusive?

Learning from Engaging Opportunities

Engaged research as a route to epistemic justice

How can you plan effectively for engaged research?

Citizen inquiry: Synthesizing science and inquiry learning

Online citizen science: social technologies in use