Collaborative Development Fund 2023-24

As a rapidly moving area, possible themes include but are not limited to: 

• How GAI can create personalized learning paths for students based on their interests, goals, and preferences. The project could investigate the benefits and challenges of generative AI to tailor each student's curriculum, content, and feedback. 

• How GAI can be used to enhance the creativity and innovation of students and teachers. The project could explore how generative AI can be used to generate novel ideas, solutions, or products for various domains and disciplines. 

• How GAI creates both challenges and opportunities for the accessibility and inclusivity of Higher Education. The project could analyze how generative AI can be used to provide multilingual support, assistive technology, or adaptive interfaces for staff and/or students with diverse needs and backgrounds.

• How GAI can impact administrative operations by adopting approaches that focuses on streamlining, standardizing, and automating processes. This might include discussion of the possible challenges of ensuring equity and access for all in a period of rapid change.  

• How GAI can impact the undertaking of academic research. The project could also examine the ethical and social implications of using AI for research purposes, such as ensuring the validity, reliability, and reproducibility of the results and addressing issues of bias, privacy, and accountability. 

Possible themes to explore include: 

Managing Techno-Stress: Strategic approaches for staff or students

Technology-related stress, or techno-stress, refers to the negative psychological and physical impacts that arise from the use of or exposure to technology. Techo-stress can manifest in various ways including: information overload, techno-uncertainty, techno-invasion: techno-complexity, techno-fatigue and social isolation. This project could examine strategies that can be deployed at an institutional, curriculum and/or personal level, to support staff and/or students navigate and utilise technology without becoming overwhelmed by the negative impacts.

Digital Transformation and Digital leadership

Digital transformation is a series of deep and coordinated cultural, workforce, and technology shifts; successful digital transformation requires effective digital leadership.  This project could examine best practices around digital transformation and the skills, knowledge and attributes required to lead effective digital transformation.

Understanding Student ‘Becoming’

Understanding student becoming is crucial for educators, policymakers, and higher education institutions as it informs the design of more effective teaching and learning environments. It is an underdeveloped area of activity in HE that could provide invaluable pointers on the power of student agency for HEIs looking to improve student outcomes and rectify attainment gaps. This project could provide insights into the factors influencing student development and point to recommendations for enhancing the student experience.

Possible questions to address include:

• How can institutions expand their strategic approach to EDI to include additional and emerging characteristics (‘need to be protected’ as well as ‘legally protected’)?
• How are institutions (other organisations?) using intersectionality as a lens to support strategic EDI change? What are the challenges, enablers and gaps in knowledge needed to facilitate an intersectional approach?
• How are institutions aligning multiple EDI priorities to create a holistic and integrated strategic approach to EDI (not zero sum but sum of all parts)?
• How are institutions developing metrics, key performance indicators and evaluation methodologies to effectively measure the impact of their EDI strategy and practice?
• What are institutions doing to create capacity and competence for sustainable strategic EDI change? Could include structures, governance and accountability, leadership development, training and CPD, reward, recognition and sanction.
• How are institutions taking a strategic approach to EDI in their international work? Could include overseas campuses, international partnerships, work with international students, adapting EDI strategy and activity to different cultural contexts and legal frameworks.
• How are institutions working in partnership in developing strategic EDI activity, bringing groups, interests and perspectives together across different areas of EDI?
• To what extent can large language models such as ChatGPT and other forms of AI support strategic EDI initiative

Possible questions to address include: 

• How could we use the socio-ecological model of well-being and mental health transform our organisational design?   
• How could we use social psychology and sociology to enable more effective groups and team-working?  
• What can we learn from indigenous models of leadership and community to transform our ways of working?  
• How could we create greater alignment between purpose-full institutions and enabling economic sustainability?   
• What can we learn from design thinking to transform ways of working for continuous improvement?   
• How could we re-think structure and culture to enable a learning organisation?   
• How can we accelerate leadership development pathways for professional service staff, enabling universities to build leadership capacity and retain talent?