In search of evidence: measuring community engagement, a pilot study

This pilot project investigates the practicality of using current published information to report against a set of indictors to determine the type and extent of community engagement activity in Victorian universities. This involved the examination of national and international literature in order to develop a preliminary set of indicators, which will then be tested against the data available at Victorian universities. Recent discussions about the inclusion of the community engagement agenda as part of the National Protocols for Higher Education Approval Processes and calls for Third Stream funding have highlighted the need for some measures of university-community engagement. Such measures of engagement should offer tangible evidence of the role that universities play in the educational, social and economic wellbeing of local communities and the nation more broadly. In Search of Evidence builds on the self-audit of Victorian universities undertaken for the Department of Education and Training, Victoria in 2005, reported in Beyond Rhetoric: University-Community Engagement in Victoria. One of the recommendations made was for the development of appropriate indicators for engagement in Research and Teaching Quality frameworks. The pilot project therefore investigates the practicality of using currently collected and published information to report against a set of indictors to determine the type and extent of community engagement activity in Victorian universities. This will involve the examination of national and international literature in order to develop a preliminary set of indicators, which will then be tested against the data available at Victorian universities. A major condition for such an indicator set is that it does not generate yet another demand on universities to generate data, but that it can operate within the framework of the current data collected and reported by universities. The intention therefore of this report is not to suggest a new suite of indicators but to select from those that have been suggested in the literature, a set which could be applied to evaluate the nature of community-university engagement in Victoria. Or, to be more precise, to actually assess whether such an approach might work