Services and support for Universities and Research Hubs

Developing & Strengthening Internal Capacity

The Third Degree is a collective of global senior academics across disciplines. At the heart of our expertise is a genuine learner-centric approach to developing researchers and educators. Underpinning this is a world class understanding of traditional and modern methodologies, stakeholder outreach initiatives for research dissemination and communication, and successful careers as researchers and educators.

The focal point for The Third Degree is to elevate education outcomes. We partner with Universities to provide resources and expertise at students’ fingertips, and to ensure Universities are delivering research-based programmes that meet the needs of tomorrow. Our expertise can be embedded into existing University structures to complement their offerings, and to extend existing capabilities in delivering quality outcomes.

Our capabilities currently extend into disciplines associated with Arts & Social Science, Education, and Business Faculties. Our associates hold advanced degrees in their discipline area, are strong industry and service contributors, are adept at developing emerging researcher capabilities, and have excelled in delivering scholarly and student-focussed outcomes throughout their career.

Consultancy & Capacity Development

Universities are reacting with determination and creativity to the new challenges they face. Budget deficits have mushroomed following sudden declines in endowment values, deep cuts in education funding and limits on tuition fee increases.

Competition in the global job market is making new programmes, new training and new models of instruction essential in order for students to obtain gainful employment after graduation. And amidst a fluctuating student population, universities are harnessing new technologies, such as e-learning, as a way to reach even more students.

These pressures place core academic missions of teaching, research and outreach at risk.

To help bring the focus back to schools’ core missions, The Third Degree assists departments, faculties, and institutions get back on the path to success:

•We are working to redesign the university model to make higher education a reality for more students globally.

•We closely examine school operations and organisations to determine which administrative support functions, and redundancies, are diverting scarce resources away from higher education’s core purpose. We are finding ways to rationalise traditionally decentralised and highly complex organisation structures with widely disparate service levels and unworkable spans of control.

Programme Audit, Development & Accreditation

Every higher education institution must comply with the commitment to satisfy the needs of and expectations generated by society. In the context of a knowledge society and the increasing internationalisation of university programmes, the quality assurance of different programmes on the various levels of the higher education continuum is an inescapable challenge.

Ensuring that each and every programme on offer exceeds the mandated minimum standards is essential. The Third Degree offers programme audit services to evaluate programme resources, delivery, and growth against national-standard benchmarks; as well as providing guidance and action plans for remedial action should improvement be required. The Third Degree also offers programme development and accreditation services to new universities, enabling measured but realistic growth in programme offerings, whilst ensuring quality resourcing, delivery, and continuity.

Early Career Academic Development

The Third Degree offers comprehensive support and development opportunities to help progress our clients’ early career academics.

Academics are central to the success of all universities for researching and teaching.

The Third Degree’s development programme is available to institutions to support researchers’ progression, nurture supervisory and collaborative research skills, and help academics to build a highly successful and fulfilling career here.

This training programme, delivered remotely, face-to-face, or in blended mode, has been curated by several exceptional educators, each of whom have held senior faculty positions.

Designed for Universities that lack substantive internal development support, not only does The Third Degree team deliver the programme, but our academics work with key departmental leaders to develop internal professional growth opportunities for continued delivery and success of the programme. We provide a structured development programme for early career academics to support them in progressing. This takes the form of a set of achievement milestones, which clearly outline expectations throughout the development period. These milestones are mapped to our extensive development offer so it’s clear what support is available at each stage.

Customised Programmes

Our academic partners are available to custom-curate programmes in their area of speciality for your institution.