Pitching Research: Insights and Reflections from using a Web Portal in a Doctoral Course Exercise

Faff’s (2015, 2019) pitching research concept provides a simple 2-page template tool, with the aim of presenting a framework SO THAT a novice researcher can confidently and succinctly convey all the essential elements of a new research proposal to an academic expert. The “low technology” way of implementing the pitching research exercise is to create a pitch using a WORD version of the template. However, a web portal version is freely available at PitchMyResearch – and this provides a more “high tech”, “mobile friendly” way of completing the pitching task. The current paper explores user data (primarily, the sequence of completion and time spent on each item) extracted from the web portal, based on pitch exercises conducted in a PhD course at the University of Queensland.