After 11 years of Excellence in Research for Australia, the time and costs for universities and the value it creates for other sectors (none of which made submissions to a recent review) are unknown.
From a College of Teaching to vocational education, international students and whether to raise tuition fees, there is a lot in the ministers’ inboxes.
There can be little doubt that the research environment in universities is changing: it is now less a collegiate community of scholars than a competitive game of winners and losers. This transformation…
Academics love games. We can’t resist playing them – but the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is our favourite. As the results of the UK’s 2014 assessment of university research are digested, academics…
Research assessment is only partly reliable as an indicator of the real quality of the work going on in higher education. It has a dual character. On one hand it is rooted in material facts and objective…
The dominance of a “golden triangle” of universities in the latest research assessment exercise has renewed concerns that other universities may get less government research funding in future. The results…
With Christmas not far off, universities will be hoping for some early presents in the form of good results in the UK’s long-awaited assessment of the quality of university research. Although the funding…
For the first time, the “impact” of academic research on the wider world has been included in a large-scale assessment of the quality of university research, which has just been published. One-fifth of…
Think of a researcher measuring the trajectory of a laser beam in a university physics lab or a history professor digging through a church’s long-lost archives and their work can often feel far removed…
What is it that sets academic publications apart from articles on The Conversation? Peer review might be your first answer. While The Conversation is built around a journalistic model, there is a big growth…