One of the various ways Universities have developed to metricise and measure academic performance is the notion of an engagement case study. This form of reporting is often used when formally-published academic papers are not produced from a project, or when other major components of a project revolve around external engagement and media rather than simply academic outputs. These are then collated for an overall measure of School/Faculty/University engagement metrics as well as being used to award “points” to researchers.
Over the past three years, I worked on a major project that I initially intended to be a single creative work counted as a research output. I was aghast when university admin decided a podcast was not creative and instead bundled up a series of work and engagement into the case study. Ironically, if this approach results in points awarded to me under our internal systems, it will be actually be much better for me than the original creative work would have been.
In addition to filling in a proforma, I developed an 11-page report (mostly graphics) to make my claim for this work as a major engagement case study.
I’m making this available here as it may be useful to others going through this process, though your mileage mary vary based on institutional priorities, policies, and how much fibre your assessor has eaten that week.
The executive summary is below and the full document can be downloaded as a PDF here.
Exective Summary
This project consists of a three-year multi-platform, cross-disciplinary engagement project that resulted in several research outputs, many news articles and soft literature, dozens of hours of published audio content, and engagement with dozens of universities and cultural institutions around the world.
The project focused broadly on investigation and engagement in the field of ‘palaeo-media’ – that is, media content (including fiction, science communication, film, research and more) produced about palaeontology or extinct organisms. The project adopted multiple communication and media methodologies and lines of enquiry as a method to interrogate, engage with, and integrate a popular field of science.
The major component, but by no means the only component, of the project was the creative production of a podcast focused on science communication (specifically within palaeontology) and the links between science and media across that discipline. Activities associated with the podcast included end-to-end production, creation of all branding and social media, creation and maintenance of the podcast website, publication of related material and all other aspects of the production.
This report demonstrates the breadth of outcomes and outputs from the project as a major engagement case study at Charles Sturt University.