Tuesday, 28 October 2014

The Information Resources Academic Development Group

Within the Information Resources Group here at ScHARR we have an academic development group, cunningly titled the Information Resources Academic Development Group (IRADG). In line with the other academic disciplinary groups within our section of Health Economics and Decision Science, we meet every other month to discuss issues relating to our personal and professional development. Due to the diversity of roles that we have, we alternate the topics of our sessions. We have occasional visitors to give us an insight into areas that we feel we need to know more about but the sessions are generally led by members of our team.

Our topics rotate between teaching and research. To give a flavour of what we do, in our last meeting we discussed our research plans for the next three years and how our applied project work, particularly around literature searching, could feed into more methodological research, such as the work undertaken by Ruth Wong on “Assessing searches in NICE Single TechnologyAppraisals: Practice and Checklist”. In IRADG we are keen to look more at a variety of areas, such as grey literature searching and diagnostic searching to name but two.

In our last teaching focussed meeting, we discussed our many and varied teaching commitments and also discussed opportunities for further development. Within our team, we have people who have undertaken the SheffieldTeaching Assistant, become Fellows of the Higher Education Academy, undertaken Certificates in Learning and Teaching, undertaken Masters level qualifications in teaching and our own Helen Buckley Woods is currently in the process of taking an EdD in Higher Education. Phew!

Within the group, we all take our development and progression seriously, and the IRADG provides an excellent opportunity to meet, discuss and plan how to take this forward. I have been chairing this group since its inception in 2009 and whilst I am on maternity leave I am handing over to Ruth Wong to continue the good work! 

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