Do the work anyway!

Key points from the data:

• Undertaking unfunded or internally-funded project work prior to applying for OLT grants can provide aspiring OLT grant applicants with experience in, for example, forming a team, working with people, fleshing out an idea, applying for ethics clearances, building a body of evidence, managing a budget and running a learning and teaching project.
• Applying to OLT for funding on the basis of having completed 'pilot work' in learning and teaching may be advantageous. 

In the section titled Building the project team, Bill (D-size institution) spoke about the importance of 'the project before the project'. He encouraged people to pursue their good ideas with or without funding, believing that this was beneficial for a number of reasons in the lead up to applying for an OLT grant. For example, it gave team members an opportunity to work with each other and recognise each other’s strengths. It also meant that the OLT application could point to 'runs on the board' in terms of established evidence and efficacy of the original work in relation to the proposed OLT project. Bill (D) summarised it like this:    

Because you continue to develop your thinking, develop, fine tune things, continue to sort of grow the team or see things. So keep things ticking over. It has always been important that … the research skill development work can be sustained without money anyway. And the money is just there to do whatever we would be doing, maybe at a better level of evaluation or research orientated approach to it.

In Bill's (D) case, the work he did in the unfunded or internally-funded project work meant that he had a data set from the students who participated in the project. For the OLT project, he could follow the now-graduated students into the workplace to further explore the outcomes of the original project and to improve on his educational model. This approach, he suggested, made his OLT application more compelling. He said, 'It actually meant that from quite early on we could interview students who are graduates of programs'.

Lucy (C), too, referred to the benefit of going to OLT with pilot work having been carried out:

I'd done some research at the same time with this colleagues, so for a year we'd already been collecting focus group data, we'd done a pilot, we'd presented a paper, we'd written a paper. So we had a bit of, you know, done a bit of pilot work.

Mikko (A) offered similar advice in saying, 'When you have some initial runs on the board, apply for an OLT grant with a team that you already know well and who are able and willing to work together'.

The accounts offered by Bill (D), Lucy (C) and Mikko (A) suggest that 'doing the work anyway' offers some clear advantages for aspiring OLT grant applicants.