NORDP 2018 Annual Research Development Conference

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Foundations of Research Development: An Introduction

(8 hours)

This short course is intended for new research development (RD) professionals (i.e., those with fewer than three years of experience in RD), or for individuals who are considering becoming RD professionals. The instructors are all experienced RD professionals (we have more than half a century’s worth of experience in RD between us), and the course material is all information we all wish we’d had when we were first getting started in the profession.

This course is an introduction to RD; it isn’t going to cover everything that RD professionals do, or all the ways in which we do those things. It will, however, provide a theoretical and practical grounding in RD for individuals who are newer to the profession or who are considering joining it. If we’ve learned anything in the course of our own careers in RD, it’s that there’s always something new to learn, a new perspective to consider, etc. What we want to do with this course is to help participants put those things in context, fully expecting that the information presented here will be augmented and supplemented (and in some cases supplanted) by other presentations during the annual conference, additional training opportunities, webinars, and lived experience throughout participants’ careers.

This course will be taught by RD professionals, for RD professionals, and exclusively from an RD perspective, although we will discuss ways in which RD professionals interact with other institutional and organizational offices involved in the research enterprise. RD has different “looks” and “feels” because it must be responsive to the needs of the researchers and scholars that it supports, and also the particular cultures and needs of the institutions where it is practiced. This course will not capture all of those looks and feels, but it will provide a framework for understanding who RD professionals are, what makes them good at what they do, the kinds of things that RD professionals do (and why), and resources that RD professionals can use in their day-to-day work.

The presenters are:

  • Peg AtKisson, AtKisson Training Group
  • Leigh Botner, University of Delaware
  • Andrea Buford, Northern Illinois University
  • Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, Elsevier/Northwestern University
  • Michael Spires, Oakland University