Governance, Policy and Strategic Alignment

IFN001 is provisioned as a non-faculty unit but models standard unit management and compliance. It is a service provided by the Education Portfolio of the Academic Division on behalf of the University with QUT Library as the designated Service Owner. Governance and operation of IFN001 is designated as follows.

  • Service Manager - responsible for strategic and operational governance and planning, including provisioning, service management, risk assessment and overall quality assurance.
  • Coordinator, Information Research Skills - (equivalent to faculty Unit Coordinator) responsible for unit coordination, including content and curriculum design, data and reporting, administrative procedures and workflows, records management, teaching team coordination and development, assessment design, marking and moderation, performance metrics and quality assurance.
  • AIRS Library Adviser - responsible for assisting the Coordinator, Information Research Skills in data and reporting, administrative procedures and workflows, records management, student queries and service mediation, meetings management, teaching team coordination and development and compliance.
  • Teaching Team - (equivalent to faculty Sessional Teaching Team) responsible for teaching supplementary workshops, assessment marking, and contributing to content and format review and quality improvements. The teaching team is comprised of the Coordinator, Information Research Skills and Liaison Librarians as part of their substantive duties.

Compliance

A number of critical activities assure the continued efficacy of IFN001 including:

  • University unit evaluation strategies (Student Voice and Teaching Team Surveys):
    • The Student Voice Survey is an end of teaching period survey, comprising of questions relating to the unit and the teaching. It includes 7 unit questions and 2 teaching questions, with the teaching questions deployed for each teaching team member in a unit (i.e. unit coordinator, relevant tutor, relevant demonstrator).
    • The Teaching Team Survey allows educators to provide qualitative feedback on their experience of the units that they are teaching in.
  • Risk Assessments: The IFN001 risk assessment has been refined with the assistance and feedback from other service owners to ensure that it is robust, holistic and that identified risks are valid.

Partnerships

The Library administers and manages the unit IFN001: Advanced Information Research Skills (AIRS). The curriculum and resources are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike licence.

The AIRS Coordination team work closely with other areas of the university, including the Graduate Research Centre (GRC), to support research students by:

  • collaborating to develop seamless administrative procedures as they relate to IFN001
  • communicating to ensure students' progress is effective, efficient and supported
  • ensuring students and staff are kept up to date with changes in the research and publishing landscape, data management, legislation, and research integrity.

The Library's Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) collaborates with Graduate Research Education & Development (GRE+D) to advertise and promote IFN001 workshops, offered and facilitated by the Library, through GRE+D's graduate training program. This program is designed around three central pathways: Advance, Lead and Engage. These pathways allow students to easily identify skills embedded within all HDR learning offerings and provides opportunities to assist faculties and training providers to align their resources with key areas of skills development. Students engage with a Skills Assessment tool to assist in determining their skill requirements and opportunities for engagement in the pathways. All HDR students are mandated to complete Research Integrity Online and IFN001. For more information see Building Further Skills, Module 12 (PDF, 938KB).