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The site-specific performance Capel: The Lights are On increased public understanding of the importance of place and belonging and empowered people with learning disability to articulate cultural capital and heritage through creative intervention. It impacts on civil society and cultural life. It reached a diverse audience of first time and regular theatre goers, people with learning disability, and professional artists. Beneficiaries include its audiences, its participants and the wider circle of professional support, families, friends, and the community of Ceredigion. It facilitated better understanding of rural Welsh life. It temporarily re-opened a former focal point for community and cultural life. It revealed ability rather than disability by making equality between participants clear.
Our research has created a framework that sustains new forms of effective collaboration for distributed workers and learners in `live environments'. The framework has resulted in a software toolkit and online guidelines designed for the new collaborative spaces: from avatar and embodied worlds to live video meetings. One part of the framework has transformed the work of international universities and multi-disciplinary research institutes, improving their 3D, avatar-based work and `embodied' learning spaces, while another aspect has created our FlashMeeting (FM) video-meeting tool. Released in 2003 (predating multi-party Skype™ by seven years), this research brought multi-party, in-browser, video meetings to thousands worldwide, including recording and analytic features that have only now started to emerge commercially.
Profitnet®, established in 2004 by researchers at the University of Brighton's (UoB) Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM), has influenced the performance of over 1,100 small businesses in the UK, Ireland and South Africa, working with the leaders of these businesses and affecting the working life of around 15,000 employees. The University has established 84 peer-to-peer networks in these countries, transforming the profitability and sustainability of the participating small companies. Evidence from the county of Sussex shows that Profitnet-participating firms in Sussex increased their gross profits by 9% while the overall population of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the county experienced a decrease of 15.2% in profits during the same time.
This case study describes the impact of 15 years of research on the health and well-being of people with severe and complex disabilities. Through collaboration with education and disability services, research-based guidance has been developed on communication intervention and safe eating and drinking, informing:
Outputs are also cited in many education, health and social care internet advice sources (see sections 4 and 5).
Impact is primarily economic and organizational, resulting from more effective leadership processes and practices by small firm owner-managers. The mechanism of impact was a programme known as LEAD (leadership, enterprise and development), which drew a significant community of owner-managers of smaller firms in Greater Merseyside into the Management School, to enable them to use research findings about managerial and entrepreneurial learning, leadership and business support in the running of their firms. The resulting impacts were on management practices and processes, and firm performances. Practitioners engaging with the University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS) LEAD programme experienced turnover increases averaging 21%. The beneficiaries are small firms, their employees and business support partnerships.
The delivery of interchangeable services across a range of educational platforms has been a long-term problem in the field of technology enhanced learning. The Institute for Educational Cybernetics (IEC) identified widgets as having a potential role in resolving this problem, and developed a widget server, Wookie, to provide a research tool to investigate this. The research is summarised in [4] and [6]. The work attracted international attention, and the server has been reused in a number of other projects to provide interoperable services, both in education and beyond, and including a number of European funded initiatives. The impact of the work was recognised and enhanced by its acceptance by the Apache Software Foundation as an incubator project. It has now graduated as Apache Wookie, and is a full Apache project.
Since the late 1990s, research has been undertaken into the theoretical and practical implications of nature-based physical activities and outdoor education. The research, which consisted of phenomenologically-informed case studies, has linked informal, non-formal and formal outdoor learning to consolidate understanding of the social, personal and environmental impacts. The impact has been significant in providing theoretical and practical foundations to inform practitioner work in youth based non-formal outdoor education in European countries. This has been achieved through the establishment of companies and a centre promoting outdoor education, and the production of practical Handbooks available to download.
Research by the University of Nottingham's Education and Technology for Health team has benefited healthcare students, professionals, users, carers and institutions both in the UK and internationally by establishing a participatory methodology for high-quality, sustainable multimedia Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs). These learning tools are now used in 50 countries globally to facilitate individual access to knowledge, enhance learning within curriculums and deliver continuing professional development, with feedback showing satisfaction of up to 100% in some nations. They are also being used to train healthcare professionals in resource-poor countries, further strengthening the University of Nottingham's role as a global education provider.
The Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC) project, which UWE researchers led the design of and played a key role in undertaking, informed policy debates on a range of issues including the quality of teaching and learning in Further Education (FE) settings. Several FE sector teacher training programmes (e.g. Cardiff University) have changed aspects of their content as a consequence of this research, for example to help trainees better understand and develop a positive learning culture in their classrooms. This benefits the trainee teachers and, as a consequence, the learning outcomes for the students they work with. Processes to enhance the practice of established teachers in FE have been implemented as a consequence of this research, for example, City of Bristol College's peer mentoring scheme improves the skills of lecturing staff and outcomes for learners. The project also produced a book that has been widely adopted by FE managers and tutors to help them better understand and enhance the learning context in contemporary college and adult education environments, resulting in more effective teaching and learning. On a wider level the research findings have influenced national policy debates on issues around the funding, practice, and management of teaching and learning activities across the post-compulsory education sector, particularly in further education.
Our research into practices around learning resources has had a major impact on teaching in other higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and internationally, on the policy of funding bodies, has been embedded in repository design, and contributed to public policy on transparent government. Our emphasis on socio-cultural factors has changed educational culture, leading to richer policy, by shifting debate from a view of resources as technological objects, to practices.Through shaping the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Higher Education Academy (HEA) programmes in Open Educational Resources (UKOER) and Digital Literacies, our research has had impact on professional services around open learning practices in over 90 HEIs, and had direct impact on digital literacy support in at least six. Our findings have informed a report to the Cabinet Office on 'Transparent Government'. Internationally, our work has prompted major repositories of resources in the USA, Estonia, the Netherlands and Australia to take a user-centred social focus in repository design.