Date: 19/05/2021

Speakers: Jayashri Ravishankar, Roger Hadgraft, Anne Gardner, Enda Crossin and Sasha Nikolic

Jayashri Ravishankar

• Met contacts through conferences
• Make use of funding to travel
• Bringing collaborators as a keynote

Roger Hadgraft

• Finding common ground, connections at AAEE (use coffee breaks)
• Introductions from AAEE community to international community (get to know older staff)
• Very difficult to predict – cannot tell which connections will take root
• “Be a social butterfly”

Anne Gardner

• Attending conferences are good for senior staff to set up project teams
• Two different types of networks – reading from authors (textual network) -> meeting people (personal network)
• Participating in executive committees in professional bodies, e.g. AAEE committee (Australasia + ACED connection), REEN board (Australasia, international network), cross-university links (monthly research meetings, strengthening ties)
• Supervisory panels, good way to find out how others supervise and examine PhDs too
• Not everyone you talk to will be someone you work with on a long-term project, but don’t let this deter you from continuing to try

Enda Crossin

• https://www.belongeng.org/
• Read deeply
• Recruitment at AAEE – common interests, interest and engaged, willing to commit time, excitement – used contacts to meet people on the team
• Expectation of the project team – what you want from them? What you can give back? Be realistic about expectations. Consider governance framework for impact
• Support from outside, e.g. ACED, EA
• Check with colleagues – use them to form the idea and insights from outside of engineering education
• Have a project plan – keep things ticking over
• Aim for diversity in your team - region, gender, career stage, research background.

Sasha Nikolic

• Conference dinner (move between tables, build social network)
• Work hard and show that you’re capable (usually invites from referrals)
• Mentorship opportunities, look for connections
• Reach out to people – start small collaborations at first

Institutional barriers

• Red tape everywhere – don’t just believe what you’re told, challenge it
• Intellectual property, memoranda of understanding (risk-averse) – deal with it later
• Not everyone has the same ethics process (some institutions have more straight-forward processes) – find a collaborator with a potentially quicker, simpler process
• Finding time to work on cross-institutional collaborations (institutional support)
• Use alternate avenues of funding (not necessarily just educational ones) – no harm in trying, make sure you have a strong justification
• Look for funding from the institution for professional development

Joint authorship

• Work with people you trust
• Different abilities and willingness to write
• Get involved in other people’s books

Conferences

• AAEE
• ASCILITE
• IEEE (TALE)

Avenues for reaching out

• FB: Posting invitations for workshops
• Exec can also put things on the AAEE page
• FOR code for engineering education research and practice – write an ARC grant towards this. New code, might not be that many applications