Capacity Development

The Applied Research internal grant program supports faculty and staff in developing their research capacity. The main foci of capacity building activities are:

• Encouraging BVC faculty and staff members to develop and implement research projects by providing internal grants
• Providing assistance and support to those working on their research projects
• Organizing workshops on various research topics

The Applied Research and Evaluation unit has an annual budget of $15,000 to support research conducted by faculty and staff. The selection of proposals to receive a grant is made by the Proposal Review Committee.

Please click here for the latest Call for Proposals.

Our unit supports and monitors the internal grant research process. This includes guiding applicants in proposal writing and ethics applications as well as following through and supporting completion of final reports.

For those interested in engaging in research we organise workshops on the topics:
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Writing an Ethics Application
• Writing a Literature Review
• Sharing Your Research: How to Get an Article Published
• Seeing through Research Jargon

The range of applied research topics initiated and developed by faculty and staff from all departments in the college is impressive. We are pleased to see an increased interest of BVC faculty and staff members in pursuing research in their areas of expertise.

Internal grant recipients 2009 - 2011, their research topics and reports.

As we are beginning to learn more about the importance of knowledge transfer (KT) in applied research, we encourage our grant recipients to present their research to relevant audiences. We are pleased to note the variety and scope of these activities on local, provincial, national, and international levels. Here are a few highlighted examples.

For the College

Enhancing the capacity of Bow Valley College to access research grants for Applied Research and to lead major Applied Research studies has been a primary goal of the Applied Research unit since its inception. Over the past year, in addition to the capacity development activities for faculty and staff, considerable efforts went into the development of organizational capacity. This included:

• The development of an Institutional Research Plan for Alberta Advanced Education and Technology (AET);
• A review of all research policies and the introduction of new policies consistent with Tri Council Policy Statement;
• Obtaining eligibility to receive funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and application for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) eligibility;
• Improvement in Administrative Strategies;
• Supporting evidence-based decision making - administering research conducted by Hannover Research Council

An important facet of institutional capacity development is the development of collaborations and partnerships with community and post-secondary organizations locally, provincially, nationally and internationally. In 2010 - 2011 we were pleased to lead a strong research partnership with eight of Alberta's post secondary institutions, in relation to our research on distributed learning.