January and February have been busy months for us at VV! We are excited to share with you that we will be officially releasing two new products – the stand alone VV-Impact Reviewer software and the first set of e-learning courses – this week.

Get in touch with Bob Fedorciow (bob.fedorciow@vertigoventures.com) if you would like to know more, request a demo or place an order.

1. VV-Impact Reviewer (VV-IR)

VV-IR will be unique in the market and is intended for research institutions that are in the final stages of preparations for their national assessment submissions, such as RAE2020 or REF2021. It has been specifically targeted for use by mock panel reviewers, moderators, Unit of Assessment leads, and research office/impact staff, involved in assessing and/or strengthening impact case studies.

We have developed this latest product, VV-Impact Reviewer, based on 10 years of higher education and research impact experience, founded on the success of our market leading software, VV-Impact Tracker (VV-IT). VV-IR allows for direct and manual uploads of impact case studies for reviewing and thus can act as a stand alone system, as well as being integrated with VV-IT and other research and impact systems. The tool has been designed specifically for universities to automate and manage all their institutional processes of reviewing REF Projects/Impact Case Studies and additionally, in assessing their status ahead of submission to their national assessments.

VV-IR will:

• Greatly reduce the administrative burden of curating feedback on a university’s impact case study portfolio from multiple reviewers (potentially in numerous locations) and in tracking progress of each review cycle
• Enable impact case studies to be reviewed online, remotely at a reviewer’s convenience
• Provide a great experience for reviewers to easily provide insightful feedback
• Enable UoA/Impact leads/managers/teams to view all feedback on one impact case study from multiple reviewers (including external reviewers) in one place
• Allow reviewers to read the uploaded documents and guide them to provide scores and comments for each section, as well as, provide overall commentary highlighting strengths, weaknesses, gaps etc., suggestions for improvement, and, current and potential grading. (Please note: we have also developed a customisable review matrix to assist this process, to meet institutional needs)
• Aggregate scoring from multiple reviewers and display scoring analytics in easy to read graphs
• Enable the university and/or departments to readily collect and coordinate insights from multiple reviewers on the same impact case study, such as from industry and other academics
• Enable the research office to moderate impact case study feedback to provide consistency across the portfolio before feeding back to project owners, departments and impact leads
• Enable the provision of high quality input for academics to develop and strengthen their impact case studies further.

2. E-learning modules on Research Impact

We have developed the first two in a set of four e-learning courses. After nearly a decade of working with many thousands of researchers we are delighted to be able to offer our insights in an easy to follow, accessible e-learning course so that academics can learn more about impact at a time convenient for them.

This set of four online courses is focused on planning for, identifying, evidencing and narrating research impact that will run academics and professional staff, such as research support and impact officers, through the basics of how to approach impact planning and reporting, and then step by step moving to the specific applications in each area.

We are releasing these online courses during the first half of 2019 in two phases. See below for more information on Course 1 and 2.

Course 1: What is Research Impact?
This is an introductory course to research impact. It will cover the key concepts in research impact as well as impact reporting: What is impact and why is it important? How has the field of research impact developed over the years? What national assessment frameworks include impact and what’s impact’s role in funding applications? The course answers these questions and more and will give you a good understanding of what research impact is.

Course 2: Identifying Impact
This is the second course in our 4-course pathway. It will go into more depth on how to identify research impact. What are the different components you should be looking at? We will cover stakeholders, outcomes, impact activities and indicators. Knowledge of what these concepts consist of and how to plan for them is a crucial first step in creating your impact narrative.