How INSPIRE is built to help you: resources built for busy academics
Channel: Michael Noetel Performance Psychologist
Date: 2021-06-20

http://bit.ly/INSPIREToolkit

At INSPIRE, we’ve written systematic reviews and they’re usually long, often technical, and sometimes not very applied. But, given these reviews are so useful for informing decision-making, we want to make using them easier. We also want to help you achieve whatever goals you have in your academic career, be them awards and promotions, or just engaged and thriving students.
So, INSPIRE works in three key ways. First, we’ve summarised dozens of systematic reviews into brief summaries that take under 5 minutes to read. They’re designed to be easy to digest, and they point you to other resources so you can implement the strategies, if you decide to use them. You can also sort and filter these summaries, so you can find all the ones focused on assessment, for example, and sort them based on how effective they are. That way, you can get the best information at your fingertips to help with the most common decisions that academics make.

Second, we know systematic reviews are unfamiliar to many people, particularly when it comes to higher education. As a result, we’ve designed a brief training program that will help you master these reviews. We want to help you understand why reviews are useful and how you can use them in your teaching. We’ll also talk about how to integrate this kind of evidence with your expertise and the context. This training is designed to be learn-when-you-like and will give you a certificate of completion. Basically, we want to help everyone understand the basics of evidence-based teaching.
But, finally, some people want more than just a 2-hour introduction. They want something to say “I’m an evidence-based teacher.” To those ends, we’ve got an accreditation program to both mentor and acknowledge people who have mastered evidence-based teaching. We’ve set out a few tasks to let academics demonstrate their mastery and set a few criteria for what excellence looks like. The summaries in the toolkit are like a roadmap to evidence-based teaching, and these criteria are like the flags at the finish line. But, we don’t want staff to be on the road alone, so we’ll provide support, feedback, and mentoring to staff until they master the content.

Together, we hope INSPIRE makes evidence-based decision-making easier and more useful to everyone teaching at university. We hope these approaches help you become more confident in applying systematic reviews. We hope to make these reviews easier and more accessible to everyone. And, we hope to help you reach your personal goal and your goals for your students too. Inspirational, huh?