HDR Development Survey Update – What you have told us so far

 

A few weeks ago, the HDR development team sent out an email asking for feedback about the social events you want to experience during your HDR journey and also what discussion channels you want us to add to HDR Connect. If you have not had a chance to respond yet or missed the email from the HDR development team, you can find more information here.

The surveys will remain open for a few more weeks, but here are some key findings based on the responses we have so far.

 

 

For the HDR Connect Survey

So far, there is a lot of interest in opportunities to discuss research methods, data analysis and thesis writing. These are areas the HDR Development team have been discussing creating more learning opportunities via REST and workshops too. So keep your eye out for some more structured skill development opportunities as well as these discussion spaces on Teams.

The majority of respondents also indicated they wanted to be able to work together online. We already have a few online groups that meet throughout the week, so we will move these into a dedicated HDR Connect channel soon to allow more people to find the online rooms and keep track of when these largely student-led sessions run.

Interestingly, the way the HDR Connect space is most commonly used at the moment (i.e. a space for sharing your research via the fortnightly HDR Connect Seminar) was not considered as useful by respondents as most of the other channels proposed. The survey does not ask if you have been attending these sessions, so it is possible that respondents so far were not aware of these sessions or alternatively, perhaps the survey wording is a bit unclear. Just in case it is the former, if you weren’t aware, there are fortnightly online seminars held on HDR Connect on Mondays from 1-2pm ACDT. Last week’s presentation was a fascinating discussion between Dr Madeleine Regan and her supervisor as they explain how to turn a thesis into a book. You can find out more about the HDR Connect seminars program here.

Lots of food for thought for us!

 

 

For the Social Events Survey

Options which included learning/listening with social time are the most popular choices so far. Other common choices include:

  • Morning tea or afternoon tea
  • Picnic on campus or a lunchtime catchup
  • Quiz night
  • Drinks on campus

Most respondents do not seem to have a preference for whether the events are run by the OGR or their college. However, there are two exceptions. For Quiz night events, a higher proportion of respondents indicated they would prefer the OGR rather than their college to run this type of event (and similar i.e., games nights).  In contrast, College run events were considered preferable for BYO lunch catchups or for off-campus dinners.

Most respondents have indicated they want some form of monthly opportunity to connect with the HDR community in a social setting. While some opportunities have a clear trend towards being preferred as an annual event offering (i.e., College bake-off, Pub crawl, Talent show etc.)

Whilst there is very much a preference for on-campus in-person events in these initial findings, we haven’t forgotten about our external and part-time candidates. Once we close the survey (in about a month) we will be exploring the results by enrolment type and by college so we can make sure that the changes we implement can be as inclusive as possible and capture the preferences of all our HDR community. So keep your eye out for updates in the Dean’s weekly and the monthly ‘Staying in the loop’ newsletter.

 

 

Thank you so much to everyone who has already taken the time to fill in these surveys. We look forward to being able to implement these changes very soon.

If you missed the email or just haven’t had a chance to fill in the surveys yet, there is still time. Click the speech bubbles below to access each survey. You can also find out more about the development of these surveys in this blog post.

 

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