CEDA (formerly known as Educational Development) is responsible for supporting all aspects of educational development for staff involved in learning and teaching across all Lancaster University programmes. The aim of this project is to gather some evidence about the changes that occur as a result of people’s participation in CEDA-related activities. We are interested in understanding what value these activities have for staff in the months and years that follow, and what changes it brings about.

You are being invited to take part in the project because you have taken part in one or more CEDA activity in the past two years. This may have involved, for example, a workshop, conference, or accredited programme. Staff often tell us that CEDA activities make a real difference, but at present we have no real evidence of this. If you have time to support us and take part, please read on – it would be much appreciated.

You may be pleased to hear that we have designed the study so that participation does not take up much of your time! After reading this information sheet, you will be asked to complete a brief Consent Form. After this, you will be asked the following three questions:

1. At which Lancaster University campus are you based?
2. In the past two years, which CEDA activities have you taken part in?  
3. Please tell us about the ways in which you have used your learning from the CEDA activities. What do you think has changed as a result?  

By taking part in this study, you will be supporting CEDA by helping us to understand what value our activities have for staff, and what changes they bring about.

No, it is completely up to you to decide whether or not you take part. Your participation is voluntary, and your decision whether to participate does not in any way affect your learning, assessment, treatment, or rights.

If you change your mind, you are free to withdraw at any time during your participation in this study. If you wish to withdraw, we will extract and erase the survey responses you contributed to the study and destroy them. However, it is difficult and often impossible to take out data from one specific participant when this has already been anonymised or pooled together with other people’s data. Therefore, please note you can withdraw up to 4 weeks after taking part in the study by emailing s.varey@lancaster.ac.uk.

It is unlikely that there will be any major disadvantages to taking part. Reading this form, completing the consent form, and answering the three survey questions is likely to take around 30 minutes of your time.

When you consent to take part and complete the brief survey, you will also provide us with your name and main campus location. Your data will be held by CEDA and accessible only to the project team (made up of a small number of CEDA colleagues). I will keep all personal information about you (e.g. your name and other information about you that can identify you) confidential, that is I will not share it with others. I will remove any personal information from the written record of your contribution, will take care to ensure it is not identifiable to an individual or department.

The CEDA team will use the information you share with us for evaluative research purposes only. This will include internal reports for the CEDA team and reports and/or presentations for colleagues at the university who are external to CEDA. We also anticipate disseminating the project approach and findings to audiences beyond the university, including in the form of conferences and journal papers.

Your data will be pooled with other participant’s responses and thematically analysed. When writing up the findings from this study, I will reproduce some of the views and ideas you shared with me. In doing so, I will use only anonymised quotes from your survey responses, so that although I will use your exact words, all reasonable steps will be taken to protect your identity in our project outputs.

Your data will be stored in encrypted files (accessible only by the project team – made up of a small number of CEDA colleagues) and on password-protected computers. I will keep data that can identify you separately from non-personal information (e.g. your views on a specific topic). In accordance with University guidelines, I will keep the data securely for a minimum of ten years.

If you have any queries or if you are unhappy with anything that happens concerning your participation in the study, please contact myself, Sandra Varey, by email in the first instance: s.varey@lancaster.ac.uk.

If you have any concerns or complaints that you wish to discuss with a person who is not directly involved in the research, you can also contact: Simon Allan, Head of CEDA, by email: s.j.allan@lancaster.ac.uk, by Teams, or at the following postal address: Lancaster University, POE Building, Bailrigg, Lancaster, LA1 4YW.