Welcome back to another fun-filled research year! With this first post, I wanted to do two things: 1) explain my role as research coordinator; and 2) share my approach to this year’s newsletter series.
What is a research coordinator?
The role of research coordinator is essentially a liaison role with the Office for Research Services, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ORSIE). This might include connecting research-interested faculty with funding opportunities or community partners.
A second (and in my view, more important) goal of the research coordinator role is to support faculty directly with research initiatives. This might include developing resources through ORSIE initiatives (e.g., Faculty of Applied Research Mentorship program, or the Fundamentals of Applied Research workshop series, Introduction to Applied Research at Durham College manually managed course); it might also include direct mentorship of faculty or other faculty-initiated initiatives such as my blogs, weekly drop-in research chats on Friday afternoons, and workshops.
For more information about my educational or research background, you can refer to my first blog post (2020) or this one (2023) where I also explained the role of a Research Coordinator.
This year’s newsletter series
Now that I’ve fleshed out a bunch of research information for you to refer to on my blog on an as-needed basis, I thought I would approach this year’s newsletters as a series of step-by-step series to preparing/developing a research project; if you follow along with me this academic year (2024-2025), you should be ready to propose a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project when the CTL call comes out in February/March (your project would be completed during the 2025-2026 academic year). Although I will be focussing on SoTL for this series, the same approach can be used for a non-SoTL project, so feel free to adapt as necessary for your circumstances So, follow along with me and pick away at your next research project every month or refer back to them in February/March when you’re ready to complete your application for a SoTL research project 😊 Next month we’ll tackle finding a research topic! If you’ve been reading these for the past few years, you’ll know that I have written about this topic in the past (Feb 2021a, Feb 2021b, Jan 2022, March 2023, and Feb 2024), so feel free to look back at some of my posts and get a head start 😊
