Fund for Academic Collaboration and Transformation (FACT)

The Fund for Academic Collaboration and Transformation aims to support students and staff in working together to investigate TL&A challenges and enhance the student academic experience. 

Staff bring the initial challenge, explaining what the problem is, how we know it is a problem, and what expertise students could bring in investigating it and finding solutions.

Students and OCAED staff will review the suggested challenges and select four to work on based on the outline criteria. The successful project teams will be matched up with an OCAED Student Partner, and as co-investigators you will together design and carry out a small-scale Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project, with a budget of £500.

FACT staff and student teams will present their findings at the Brookes International Teaching & Learning Conference: ‘The Political Power of Partnership Working’ in June 2026.

OCAED will support FACT teams with:

• Collaborative and scholarly project design.
• Budget management.
• Evaluating and evidencing the impact of academic enhancement.

This will include attending several EXPLORE sessions, the dates of which are available below.

OCAED are excited to announce the details of our FACT projects this academic year. You can learn more about each project below. Each team will be presenting their initial findings at the Oxford Brookes International Teaching and Learning Conference in June 2026.

Sara Marinucci, David Nelson and Lucy Widdowson: ‘Developing student confidence in using AI for academic writing’.

This project will allow Foundation students to build confidence in their use of AI tools to support their academic writing. The Project Team will work to understand current students’ use of AI before creating resources that can be used to support students in prompt engineering, searching for sources and AI speech patterns. 

Oliver Boseley and Dr Alice Gerlach: ‘Continuation in the Social Sciences (SocS)’.

Our vision is to develop programmes that make academic expectations explicit, values diverse forms of knowledge and experience, and actively fosters confidence and belonging. Teaching practices will foreground opportunities for students to develop academic skills within the curriculum rather than at its margins. Learning support will be embedded, relational, and responsive, recognising that students’ academic, social, and material circumstances are deeply interconnected.

Charlotte Ardant Carpentier, Adam Najak and Dr Laura Novo De Azevedo: ‘Beginning Well: Designing Semester Induction With Students’.

This project aims to create a responsive, student-informed semester induction model for the BA Sustainable Urban Design and Planning, and to develop a clear, transferable method for co-designing semester inductions that can be adapted by other programmes across the University.

We welcome applications from individuals or small teams of colleagues at all career stages, from all academic departments, and anyone working within the directorates. We are particularly keen to receive proposals from colleagues who have not previously conducted a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project and are seeking to extend their knowledge and expertise. 

Please note that to be eligible at least one member of the project team must hold Advance HE professional teaching recognition, either Associate, Fellow, Senior Fellow or Principal Fellow.