Awareness @ the AUA April 21, 2010
Posted by Chris Y in : Events, Updates , add a commentI attended and ran a session at the AUA (Association of University Administrators) conference, held at Warwick University over 29-31st March 2010.
The session, entitled “Your role in the management of successful strategic partnerships” was open to anyone at the conference and was well attended by staff covering a wide range of roles, departments and backgrounds.
It also proved to be the use of a new activity designed to help contextualise the BCE landscape for audiences perhaps more used to the idea of engagement being viewed as a third stream, strand or mission alongside “traditional” teaching and research.
“BCE: Business as usual?” is a distillation of ideas (originally developed for an internal audience) by the JISC Advance BCE team and proved to be a very effective way of enabling participants to map their local terminology and processes to the four dimensions of BCE being used by JISC, HEFCE and others.
You can find out more about the basics of BCE and the four dimensions by reading the project primer “What is BCE?…a primer for the rest of us…”
The videos put together by the JISC Advance BCE team also provided good material for discussion – in particular the overview provided by Professor Oisin MacNamara (Director of Research, Regional and European Affairs, Northumbria University). His video illustrated the drivers behind the moves that many institutions will be making, to integrate engagement and external partnerships into normal activities.
A major part of the session was a presentation and discussion led by Alison Mitchell (Strathclyde University and AUA board member) around the work taking place at Strathclyde. This had a particular focus on the issues surrounding CRM (Customer Relationship Management) processes and the integration with administration across the university.
We also introduced the self-analysis process from the Embedding BCE project, but unfortunately we ran out of time before we could really get going with any group discussion around the perceptions statements from the workbook. However this exercise will be repeated in more depth (with more time!) during the one-day audience-specific workshops in May and June
How is external engagement influencing your role? (FREE Events) April 16, 2010
Posted by Chris Y in : Events, Updates , add a commentWe’re running two FREE workshops, specifically exploring how external engagement is influencing the future roles of library, information and IT services in UK universities and colleges.
25th May
Libraries, Resources & Information Management for External Engagement
15th June
Extending IT Support for External Engagement
Both workshops are aimed at anyone with role working in (or with) these key institutional services (there is no requirement to be currently performing a specialist “engagement”-related role).
Each workshop will bring together staff from these services to discuss key issues emerging from engagement with the community and businesses outside of their institutions.
To find out more about what this might mean for you and how these events might help see What is BCE? A primer for the rest of us.
You’ll get a chance to share experience as well as an opportunity to find out about the practical support available to help identify, understand and further develop your own external engagement strategies and actions.
The range of engagement activity types and descriptions can also make it difficult to relate them to wider initiatives which could be providing key support and funding. These workshops should help you to make those connections and more importantly, better identify support that is already taking place – but is perhaps not currently recognised.