Want to try something new in your teaching? If so, why not apply for a TESSA – our new Teaching Enhancement Small Support Awards?

TESSAs, introduced last term, are intended for Kent colleagues who are interested in encouraging and enabling teaching and learning innovation; or who have a great idea that would improve the quality of teaching, teaching-related activity, support for teaching, or the student learning experience at Kent.

We already have University Teaching Prizes, which reward colleagues on their achievements. But sometimes what’s needed is a bit of funding to try something new, or test out an idea or a different way of working – and now you can apply for a TESSA to do just that.

We’re piloting this small grants scheme during 2017/18. You can apply for funding of between £500 and £3,000, with up to £5,000 on offer for large, high-impact, collaborative projects across the University. All colleagues who contribute to teaching, learning or teaching support are eligible to apply – you don’t have to be an academic, or based in a school.

In our first round, we were delighted to be able to fund 11 high-quality applications from all around the University, and we are now all set for Round 2. The deadline for applications has just been extended to 12 noon on Thursday 17 May 2018, for projects starting during summer 2017/18 or Autumn Term 2018/19. Successful applications will be announced by Monday 4 June.

Find out more, and download the short application form for a TESSA, on our Teaching webpages. You’ll see that previous applicants have been generous in allowing us to publish their forms, so you may be able to link up with someone doing a project similar to the one you are planning.

If you have questions, please get in touch with April McMahon or Jess Sutherland.

The University of Kent has affirmed its commitment to the fair assessment of research through the signing of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and adopting the principles outlined in the Leiden Manifesto.

Professor Philippe De Wilde, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research & Innovation, says: ‘I am happy to endorse the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, and I have signed up to it on behalf of the University. We have never used journal-based metrics for performance evaluation, and have no intention of doing so. I hope that in future the publication landscape will become more fluid. University repositories, preprint servers, professional societies, start-up publishers and established publishers all have a role to play in disseminating research. With modern IT, there is no reason for a hierarchy between those players. Let us recognise the limits of metrics as well as those of peer review.’

With the adoption of these principles, as an institution, we commit to:

• Be explicit about the criteria used to reach hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, clearly highlighting, especially for early-stage investigators, that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.
• For the purposes of research assessment, consider the value and impact of all
  research outputs (including datasets and software) in addition to research publications, and consider a broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice.

The implementation of these principles at Kent is supported through the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). We recognise that the adoption of these principles is a statement of intent and that there will be a gradual aligning of the policy and embedding the practice at Kent. As issues are highlighted and areas in contradiction with these principles come to light, we will review the policies in light of the principles, ensuring Kent has a robust and fair approach to the use of metrics for research evaluation.

The OSC is providing a route for researchers and professional service staff to report policies, procedures and behaviours that they felt were out of line with the principles included in the DORA and the Leiden manifesto. If you have any such concerns, questions or requests for training then please get in touch so that we can prioritise these requests.

Professor Jane Reeves from the Centre for Child Protection will deliver this Rutherford Grass Roots Lecture, next Wednesday 14 March, at 18.00 in Rutherford Lecture Theatre One, Canterbury Campus.

Thinking differently about topics, particularly those as complex as child protection can be very difficult. There are currently 50,000 children and young people on child protection registers in the UK (NSPCC 2016) and probably many hundreds of thousands more who are groomed and abused online or via online contacts. In order to tackle this level of abuse we have to change the way we think about child abuse, how we train professionals and how we encourage children to protect themselves and their friends.

This lecture will take you on a journey of innovation, gaming and educational theory; from the germ of an idea on how to change child protection training, to the development of a suite of child protection serious game simulations which are used across the UK and all over the world.

For further details, please click here.

Dear Students,

Thank you for your letters, emails and face-to-face conversations over the last few days. I have heard from staff and students from across the University. I have been ‘out and about’ and talking with staff and students as well and I am very concerned about how things have unfolded here at Kent in relation to the dispute over pensions. I want to assure you I am actively seeking to resolve these internally. It is not the way I want things to be and my aim is to get back to positive campus relations between us all, our staff and students. To that end, I have indicated that we will not be deducting any pay for action short of a strike (ASOS) for this period of action. In addition, we have been talking with Kent Union and the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) about our Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and hourly paid lecturers (HPLs) position to ensure there is no long-term detrimental impact if they choose to take strike action.

I appreciate that this action will impact on your experience here at Kent. My colleagues across the University are working hard to mitigate the impact of any action on you our students and this will continue.

I will personally continue with my support for the need for decent pensions and I know many of you support that position. I will also continue with my public calls for continued and constructive discussions between UCU and UUK to resolve this. I made a public call to UUK in a letter dated 21 February on this which was reported in The Times and have continued to lobby UUK to this effect. I was very pleased when discussions resumed between UUK and UCU facilitated by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). I will continue to publicly support constructive discussions. We have also been lobbying USS on this issue as well with regard to the assumptions which underlie the valuation and which are driving the deficit. We have invited them to the University to discuss this and had face-to-face conversations to raise our concerns. We have also lobbied them via UUK. We will continue to exert this pressure.

I am in regular discussions with Kent Union and I have a meeting scheduled next week to hear from Student Representatives across the University about their concerns on this issue. Please feel free to get in touch with your course, school or faculty rep about any concerns you would like them to raise when they meet with me. I have had the good fortune to meet many of our students already but hope I will get to meet more of you at one of the open forums I will be running later in the year.

Yours sincerely,

Karen

Professor Karen Cox | Vice-Chancellor and President

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for your letters, emails and face-to-face conversations over the last few days.

I acknowledge the challenges we have all been facing over the past few weeks with strike action. It is not easy trying to balance respecting the right to take action over an issue we all want resolving in the best interests of current and future staff, our University and the sector as a whole, with minimising the impact on our students and those colleagues not taking action. As I noted in an email to colleagues last week, I would like to thank all of you for the time, effort and energy that is going into working our way through this; it is much appreciated. I recognise many of you are juggling relationships and communications between students, staff taking action and those not taking action and I do not underestimate the emotional work that goes in to this when current and future relationships are trying to be maintained.

I have heard from staff and students from across the University. I have been ‘out and about’ and talking with staff and students as well and I am very concerned about how things have unfolded here at Kent in relation to the dispute over pensions. I want to assure you I am actively seeking to resolve these internally. It is not the way I want things to be and my aim is to get back to positive campus relations between us all, our staff and students. To that end, I have indicated that we will not be deducting any pay for action short of a strike (ASOS) for this period of action. In addition, we have been talking, and will continue to talk, with Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) about our Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and hourly-paid lecturers positions to ensure there is no long-term detrimental impact if they choose to take strike action. I also appreciate all that is being done to mitigate the impact of any action on our students and hope that this will continue.

I will personally continue with my support for the need for decent pensions. I will also continue with my public calls for continued and constructive discussions between UCU and Universities UK (UUK) to resolve this. I made a public call to UUK in a letter dated 21 February on this which was reported in The Times and have continued to lobby UUK to this effect. I was very pleased when discussions resumed between UUK and UCU facilitated by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). I will continue to publicly support constructive discussions. We have also been lobbying the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) on this issue as well with regard to the assumptions which underlie the valuation and which are driving the deficit. We have invited them to the University to discuss this and had face-to-face conversations to raise our concerns. We have also lobbied them via UUK. We will continue to exert this pressure.

Earlier this year, I embarked on a series of discussions in schools and professional services departments and these are continuing. I see these as a good opportunity to have conversations about our future as a University and how we can work together to create an even better working, learning and research environment. I hope I will get to meet more colleagues at one of these meetings or one of the other open forums I will be running later in the year.

I look forward to working together with you all and I thank you for all you do for the University on a daily basis.

Yours sincerely,

Karen

Professor Karen Cox, Vice-Chancellor and President

Dr Kirsty Corrigan, Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Classical & Archaeological Studies, has contributed the cover article to the latest edition of History Today magazine, March 2018, entited ‘Brutus: Character Assassination’.

Launched in 1951, History Today is a monthly magazine dedicated to bringing history to a wide audience. Its circulation is approximately 18,500 readers.

Kirsty’s article argues that Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42BCE), the conspirator behind the assassination of Julius Caesar (100–44BCE), did not always act for moral principles or for the benefit of the Roman Empire, as is usually portrayed.

The edition of History Today is on sale now, and full article is available here with an online subscription.

Small Satellites are the most disruptive technology in space industries. Recent development in electronics enabled satellites to become smaller and more intelligent.

A Special Issue on ‘Small Satellites’ has been published in Proceedings of the IEEE (March 2018 issue).

Prof. Steven Gao, from the School of Engineering and Digital Arts, is the Leader Guest Editor of this Special Issue.

Guest co-editors of this Issue include Professor Sir Martin Sweeting (OBE), Executive Chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, UK, Prof. Shinichi Nakasuka, University of Tokyo, Japan, and Prof. Peter Worden, former Director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, USA.

The Special Issue consists of 11 papers on different technologies of small satellites, authored by leading experts such as Prof. Paulo Lozano, MIT, et al. Prof. Gao is the leading author of an invited paper titled as ‘Advanced antennas for small satellites’. Proceedings of the IEEE is the flagship Journal of IEEE and has an impact factor of 9.237, much higher than other IEEE Journals.