Recording your public engagement activity

Now you can record your PE activity through Symplectic.

You can now record your public engagement (PE) activity - in the widest possible sense - under the professional activities tab in Symplectic.

Symplectic is already used for collecting publications and adding this functionality allows you to record your PE activity on an ongoing basis.

The tab was developed in collaboration with colleagues from the Library, IT and the PE team and has been tested with academic colleagues before going live.

Why should I add these activities to the system?

PE activities are promotion relevant (see criteria here); the Symplectic system can act as your storage place for this activity.

Submitted activities along with publications automatically feed through to the REF-supporting system IRIS, helping you to build REF case studies.

The University has to report to HESA for its Business and Community Interactions survey and that includes PE activities; this new process makes our figures more reliable and reduces under-reporting. This new process is now the University's way to collect data for part of the HESA-HE-BCI return.

Symplectic is the University's official repository for such information. If you have logged details of PE activity in Researchfish, you should also include it in Symplectic.

How do I add my PE activities?

To create a new PE activity record, simply:

  • Log in to Symplectic using your IT login.
  • Scroll down to ‘Professional activities’ and click on the +add button to select the ‘Public Engagement Activity’ field, which opens the form.
  • Activities can be of the following types: public lecture, performance arts, exhibition, museum education, school outreach, workshop, festival/fair stall, social media/blog, community event, focus group, interest group, patient group, and other. This covers events and activities with non-academic audiences.  We have tried to capture many different forms of public engagement. Feel free to use ‘Other’ if your activity seems not to fit the listed ones.
  • You can list people who were involved with the activity, e.g. colleagues including people not from the University.
  • There are a few more fields to fill out.
  • At the end don’t forget to press the ‘Save’ button and you are done!

For questions, please contact the Public Engagement team (31149).

For the latest news on PE, visit the PE team website.

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