Annual Report 2014, Porto

Presentations: Numbers, Formats, Topics

NW 22: Research in Higher Education had altogether 179 presentations of which 135 were papers, 11 posters, 8 symposia and 1 research workshops.

• 24 participants withdrew their accepted contribution.

Presentations focussed on the following  themes:

• Teaching, learning and assessment in higher education (34 papers, 5 posters, 1 symposium & 1 research workshop);
• Academic work and professional development (30 papers, 2 posters & 2 symposia);
• Inclusion and diversity in higher education settings (17 papers, 1 poster & 1 symposium);
• Employability and transition to work of higher education graduates (22 papers & 1 poster);
• Policy, management and governance in higher education  (19 papers & 1 symposium);
• as well as 52 contributions which were labelled in the ConfTool system as not fitting any of these topics meaning that there were mainly redirected contributions from other networks.
• Scientific level of sessions varied but in general was good

Quality of Sessions and Number of Participants in Sessions and Network Dinner

• Quite a number of doctoral students were amongst the presenters.

• Typically there were 10-20 participants in each session which guaranteed interactive discussions.
• About 15 members participated in the network dinner on Friday evening.

Concerns during the Conference

There were three concerns during the conference:

1. Four paper sessions not viable; a general rule is to have maximum of three papers per session. This year, however, mainly because of the high number of redirected papers there were some sessions with four papers which was considered to be too many in order to have enough time for presentations followed by questions. This needs to be avoided in the future conferences;
2. Conference app did not work well; conference participants had problems with using the conference app and the twitter hashtag was not the most practical;
3. Methodological and theoretical underpinnings are not discussed widely enough in the presentations. We are looking at how to improve this.

Seminar: European Higher Education – Exploring Effective Strategies for Turbulent Times 

• International seminar (funded by the EERA Council) titled European Higher Education – Exploring Effective Strategies for Turbulent Times was organised September 1, 2014 in Porto (Portugal) by the Network and Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) in cooperation with the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education CIIE - University of Porto.
• The seminar attracted more than 80 participants from 20 countries.
• The seminar consisted of a keynote, four parallel workshops and a summing up session
• <link http: www.srhe.ac.uk events pastevents details _self external link in new>Link to seminar website
• Workshop #1: Future prospects in HE for early career researchers was a joint one with ERG.
• As the main aims of the seminar were to bring together colleagues from various European countries and to provide a meeting point for emerging researchers to network with established researchers in the field of higher education it can be said that the aims were brilliantly fulfilled.