Cranfield is an exclusively postgraduate university that is a global leader for education and transformational research in technology and management. Its disciplines cover aerospace, agrifood, defence and security, energy, environment technology, leadership and management, manufacturing, and transport systems.

Research ethics is an extremely important topic because of the University’s research-intensive nature. Its diverse disciplines, however, make research ethics a particularly complex issue.

Before adopting EthicsRM, the University had three separate ethics review processes covering its varied disciplines. It recognised that a streamlined and unified system would support consistency in its approach to ethics.

Two of the previous ethics processes were entirely paper-based, while the other was online using a system developed in-house. Over time, the system’s administrator functionality became extremely time consuming and it was obvious that it was unsustainable.

Instead the University felt that a new system was required from an external supplier able to offer full and effective technical support.

After a rigorous selection process, EthicsRM was chosen – not only because of the wide range of processes that the system could easily handle, but its flexibility made it relatively quick to set up, even with Cranfield’s complex process flows. “The most time-consuming part of setting up the system was getting the academic staff to agree on the wording of the questions that applicants needed to answer,” explained Cranfield’s Brenda Roshier, Project Manager for the introduction of the system.

“Both reviewers and applicants find EthicsRM highly intuitive,” according to Andrew Kirchner, who was brought in to set up the system. “The system does what we want. Our biggest challenge is finding enough staff to act as reviewers, as we are asking all masters and doctoral level research projects to go through the system.”

Cranfield currently has applications based on four levels of risk and is shortly to introduce an additional level for human research that only requires a light touch consent approach. Andrew continued: “Changes like this are easy to make in-house using EthicsRM’s customisable workflow.”

“With a partner like Infonetica, we felt confident about being able to make changes in the system and test them fully prior to going live.”
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Part 1 of my series about doing my masters degree at Cranfield University.

In this video I talk about moving into accomodation (Lanchester Hall) and what your first day/week will be like. Tune into part 2 to hear more about the CSA and other fun spots around campus
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