Strategic Plan Workshop

Research

Monday, 16 May 2016, Joondalup Campus

Session One:Key Messages from the Current State of Research

This session asked participants to discuss and identify the important messages from the pre-reading circulated for the Research Workshop.

Focus Question:What are the key messages from the current state of research and knowledge exchange?

Overall Response

The common themes are:

The need for a cultural shift to strengthen the importance of research;

Current inconsistency in research performance and standards;

Lack of clarity around research priority areas and competitive advantage;

Lack of support and responsiveness to PhD and RHD students;

Strengthen our collaboration with industry and community;

Need to be more strategic about the promotion and dissemination of research;

Select appropriate monitoring metrics to manage better performance in research;

Realign structural support to enable more research.

Detailed Input

Note The comments below indicate common themes, as grouped by the facilitators.

Idea

Comments

The need for a cultural shift to strengthen the importance of research:

Research is not yet everyone's business;

Culture of complacency around research activity;

Disconnect between teaching and learning and research;

Need a cultural shift to strengthen the relative importance of research and teaching;

Need to encourage a culture of celebration of the research that is happening and raise the profile among our own staff;

Research culture is weak (eg: attendance at research seminars);

Need to more clearly articulate what it means to be a teaching scholar in terms of how that feeds in to research, as they are part of the loop;

Relationship between teaching, research and the student isn't adequately supported

Schools drive the research; is the capacity to do research constrained by time or infrastructure?;

Siloed excellence doesn't help the university; we need collaboration within and outside of university, we need to facilitate that.

Current inconsistency in research performance and standards

Areas of considerable improvement in the past ERA rounds;

Distinct improvement in research;

ECU has a very solid research foundation;

ECU has tremendous research potential;

Limited in areas above world standard;

Need to build solid research and find ways to be innovative and entrepreneurial;

There are some areas where we are doing very well, but other areas we are not;

Two broad areas above world standard (biological / environment and medical / health);

We do well in some areas and not others. We need to unpack why some areas are doing well, including the teaching / research ratio in various areas;

Inconsistency between research performance at ECU and the negative external perception of ECU;

Need to get over our 'Little Brother' syndrome and believe in ourselves.

Lack of clarity around research priority areas and competitive advantage

Are we trying to be everything to everyone?;

Challenge of encouraging research while ensuring we are focused;

Increase research outputs of high caliber;

Lack of clarity around key research strengths and goals;

Lack of clarity around what constitutes research;

Lack of clarity in terms of research priority areas;

Lack of clarity of research areas; what is ECU, how do we define and differentiate ourselves?;

Lack of understanding, particularly around non traditional outputs;

More differentiated; more of how we're different from the other universities (eg: we're community-minded);

Not focused! Research directions are too broad, especially within Schools;

Quality and impact; our research needs to show its effect on community;

Relevance of research;

Research at ECU should have local, national or international impact, and preferably more than one on this list;

Too disparate in the areas of research and not focused enough on key strengths;

What defines research active at ECU? Is our definition a bit lacklustre? There is a disconnect between ASPIRE and ASPEO;

What makes us unique, what separates us from other universities whilst building on our current strengths?

Lack of support and responsiveness to PhD and RHD students

Attrition rate of PhD students;

Beyond the PhD, and research leadership for early and mid-career researchers;

Insufficient mentorship of junior researchers; it should be part of the job for professors to mentor

Lack of high quality supervision for PhDs;

Lack of scholarships for PhD students;

Lack of support and responsiveness to PhD students;

Must create career and job prospects for postdocs so that we can retain them;

Our RHD completions are poor;

Relatively low profile of research excellence, so that relatively few RHD students come to ECU to seek out our researchers;

Student journey - where is our research journey?

Strengthen our collaboration with industry and community

Build on collaboration with industry and community;

Collaboration with industry and private individuals;

Build on our identity within our localities;

Lack of impact of research for community and industry;

Strengthen engagement with industry;

Government innovation strategy is focusing on collaborative research and we need to get better at this.

Need to be more strategic about the promotion and dissemination of research

Increasing the quality of outputs requires pre-planning of where the researcher will publish and where they should not;

Lack of support to strategically promote ECU as a research institution (eg: the home page is all about teaching);

Need advertisements promoting our research;

Need to be more strategic about where you publish;

Need to develop a strategy around promoting research (eg: is a publication is getting scientific and public attention then we need to capitalise on this through marketing);

Need to focus on higher quality conferences being mindful of SCIVAL and SCOPUS results

Dissemination of research could be improved;

Need to be more proactive about promoting our brand;

Need financial support to be able to deliver the research at conferences and submit them for journals (publishing costs money);

We need a positive way to disseminate research impact, to ensure the research gets the attention it needs where possible;

Need to improve networks of the ECU research community and raise the profile.

Select appropriate monitoring metrics to manage better performance in research

The sensitive issue of underperforming A/Profs and Profs who have not performed in the past and will not in the future;

This is one of our biggest issues.

ASPIRE needs to change to reward quality rather than quantity (points for number of citations in the previous year, points for papers based on journal ranking in discipline);

Assessment drives activity and we need a balanced scorecard for different academic levels and disciplines;

Developing KPIS and funneling resources and tactics toward those KPIs;

Incentivising collaboration between disciplines, universities and internationally where it aligns with research strengths and key areas for research growth;

Need to examine the metrics which are still conventional, work to the current but also keep an eye on and influence future metrics.

Realign structural support to enable more research

Difficulty in balancing teaching and research load as there are not large numbers of research only positions;

ECU needs to free up research active staff and realign structural support toward research;

We are concerned that our staffing profile does not support a research culture, with loads of sessionals currently;

Lack of planning in sourcing expertise to support research;

Writing and publications need support, time and technical writing skills;

There is insufficient expertise in enabling science (eg: stats, data management);

Need for adequate resources for academics balancing teaching and research commitments; reevaluate funding models;

Mismatch between where funds flow to and where research strengths lie.

Feeding funds to those already strong in research simply feeds those who are already very successful. Need to have a more balanced approach.

Note Two comments have been contributed by other participants, in the text above, market by the symbol.

Session Two:Suggested Initiatives

Session Two focused on ECUs research objectives to 2021.

Focus Question:In each of the following research objective areas, what are the critical initiatives or actions?(3 4)?:

Research concentration, depth and sustainability;

Research collaboration;

Engagement, application and commercialisation;

Research culture and support;

Higher degree research;

Research integrity policies and procedures.

Overall Response

The highest responses on initiatives across all of the research objectives are:

Build greater internal visibility and awareness of research;

24

Drive research concentration through appropriate metrics;

20

Plan for succession to retain people and equipment in key areas;

16

Optimise the