Online questionnaire respondents

This section provides de-identified information on respondents and their institutions.

Forty-seven higher education institutions in Australia can access OLT grant funding. Of these, 40 are universities. The remainder are a mix of institutes and colleges.

Forty-one staff from 35 Australian institutions completed the Project's online questionnaire. Many were Institutional Contact Officers (ICOs). This was unsurprising given their key liaison role and, for many, a focused and deep engagement with administrative, management and application development work in relation to their institution’s engagement with OLT’s awards, grants, fellowship and network programs. The ICOs who responded were variously academic and professional staff. The respondents who were not ICOs were nevertheless closely involved in their institution’s OLT grant activities.

The institutions have been de-identified but are categorised on the basis of the full time equivalent (FTE) number of academic staff they each employ according to the Australian Government’s My University website (no longer available) which published staff demographics for each institution. In grouping institutions from ‘smaller’ to ‘bigger’, the project team was interested to see if relative ‘economies of scale’–crudely identified by numbers of FTE academic staff–had any bearing on the breadth, depth and nature of the processes, resources and activities that supported the development of OLT learning and teaching grant applications. Would bigger institutions ‘have and do more’? By the same token, would smaller institutions ‘have and do less (and/or do more with less)?’ or would the outcome be less predictable than this? The respondent institutions were categorised and coded in the following manner:

• Nine institutions with fewer than FTE 500 academic staff. (Categorised as A-size institutions and, where appropriate, coded as A1, A2, A3, etc.)
• Eight institutions with at least FTE 500 and up to FTE 1,000 academic staff. (B-size; B1, B2, B3, etc.)
• Seven institutions with more than FTE 1,000 but less than FTE 1,500 academic staff. (C-size; C1, C2, C3 etc.)
• Eleven institutions with FTE 1,500 or more academic staff. (D-size; D1, D2, D3, etc.)

Note that the coding designation for any discrete category listed above does not necessarily signify that institutions are listed in order of increasing numbers of FTE academic staff. For example, institution B8 may have less FTE academic staff than institution B7. All C and D size institutions, however, will have more FTE academic staff than B (and A) size institutions.

This is an information-rich account of institutions' approaches to supporting the development of OLT grant applications. Data are tabulated when they lend themselves to being presented as such. Open text answers are presented as de-identified quotes and grouped by size of institution, A-size, B-size, C-size and D-size. This level of detail is useful for benchmarking purposes.