Nuffield Scholarship

This course is entirely online and has been designed in collaboration with the Nuffield Farming Scholarship programme. It aims to support scholars in developing, analysing, writing and presenting academically rigorous projects. The overall aims of the programme are to provide recipients of the Nuffield Scholarship with the skills to:

• explain the current and future challenges facing the agri-food sector
• synthesise information from industry and peer-reviewed literature
• compare the approaches taken to address specific challenges to the industry
• evaluate the extent to which new approaches and practices might be applied to systems in their home country
• deliver a high-quality extended report in an appropriate scientific style as well as creating a range of outputs to disseminate research findings to a predominantly non-scientific audience (such as social media posts, press briefing, infographic, blog, policy briefing note).

Students will be registered for two years.

Students may join the course in January, May or September.

Since only the Project Report (Extended Project) is core to the programme, scholars can choose the level of support they need to write or re-write their Nuffield report in an academic style.

New scholars wishing to participate in the Project Design module will be able to access the initial 2-weeks of this module prior to full registration; namely as soon as their Nuffield Award has been finalised.

There are no exams for this programme. Instead, all assessment is through coursework within each module. This approach helps make the scheme more compatible with the students’ working life.

Students are asked to think about what they have learnt as they progress through each module. In optional modules, this is done by questions and discussion topics in assessed forums and formative reflective tasks. These learning outcomes will be assessed in the core module (Extended Project) through the final report and the dissemination activity.

Although students receive essential and recommended reading lists, to attain merit or distinction students need to show further reading of relevant peer-reviewed literature and provide evidence of this in assessments of independent thinking through critical evaluation.

‘I did a lot of research when planning my travels and writing my Nuffield report, but I didn’t really go too far into the academic evidence. Writing the literature review opened my eyes to how much scientific research has been done on my topic around the world and I now plan to share my review with catchment stakeholders in the areas that I work.’ Tim Stephens

‘This might make me sound like a bit of a nerd, but I have really enjoyed the fact that I am now able to have more productive conversations with both academics and members of the aquaculture supply chain. The extra knowledge from the academic reading has made academic contacts more accessible, and I now feel like I am sitting in the middle of the Venn diagram in my field, rather than within one of its circles.’ Aisla Jones