Introducing the Laidlaw Network

The Laidlaw Scholars' Network: A Global Expert Community Platform for Scholars, Supervisors, Faculty and Partners to Share Their Thinking, Connect with Each Other and Become Better Leaders.
Introducing the Laidlaw Network
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Why have a network?

One of the core aims of the Scholars programme is to connect students and supervisors from the best universities from around the world; building a global network of extraordinary young people who can learn from and with each other. The network is designed to do ten things:

  • Enable students to meet Scholars from other universities with shared interests.
  • Help students find faculty from other universities who could supervise their research.
  • Provide an opportunity for students to join research projects.
  • Showcase students’ final papers and research projects, helping Scholars successfully apply for further study, internships and jobs.
  • Share leadership insights, best practise, lectures and eCourses in order to develop a new generation of great leaders who are both expert at research and believe that purpose and profit are not either/or but should be intrinsically joined.
  • Allow Scholars to join Leadership-in-Action programmes where they can put their theoretical leadership knowledge into practise; developing skills and strengths in challenging environments, learning about other cultures and paying it forward.
  • Build intra-university Scholar collaboration, team spirit and engagement by establishing private spaces for students to chat, post meeting times, share photos, videos and observations.
  • Link scholars with alumni who can mentor, advise and help advance scholars’ careers by improving their chances of finding an internship or securing their ideal job.
  • Create a safe and supportive place for women in business to discuss challenges and find solutions.
  • Connect and support university administrators and sponsors of Laidlaw Scholarship programmes; giving them a private space to exchange ideas, frustrations and best practise; talk to and collaborate with each other easily; and find up-to-date Laidlaw materials and guidelines.


What is on it?

  • A members’ directory: searchable by research topic, area of expertise, university and community group to enable students to meet Scholars and Supervisors from other universities with shared interests.
  • Faculty from leading universities who are currently mentoring Scholars to help students to find professors from other universities who could supervise their research project.
  • A universities and partners’ directory to help Scholars connect with other institutions where they might wish to research and charities where they might want to put their leadership training into practise.
  • Research posters, papers and reports to showcase Scholar’s expertise, provide an opportunity for students to join research teams, and help them to apply successfully for further study, internships and jobs. The Research channel is broken into 4 sub-channels to make it easier to navigate: Arts & Humanities, Medicine & Health, Social Sciences and STEM. Scholars are requested to post their work into these channels using the appropriate “badges” to identify the format type and the subject area.
  • Leadership insights, best practise, lectures and eCourses in order to develop a new generation of great leaders. Faculty and students are encouraged to post articles, videos, white papers, research and blogs to the Leadership channel which they have found useful and which they believe will inspire others to great leadership.
  • Descriptions of, application forms for and project details regarding Leadership-in-Action programmes which Scholars can join in their second summer. Each Leadership-in-Action project team once formed will also have its own private space, known as a “Room” where members can ask questions, find everything they need to prepare for the experience, meet their fellow team members and share photos and videos pre, during and post the expedition.
  • Private spaces, described as ‘Rooms” for each university and business school. University admins should post their Scholars Handbook and financial processes here along with documents and details about and from university specific events. Scholars should share experiences of, ask questions relating to and add photos and videos regarding their own specific Scholars activity. Note: only members of and contributors to the room will be able to see any content in a particular room. Universities looking to attract applications for scholarships should post these in the News and Events channel.
  • Alumni profiles include their willingness to mentor and coach others. Scholars can use the directory to find mentors and coaches, alumni at companies they are interested in joining and peers who can support them. We hope that Alumni will post internships, jobs and career advice in the news and events, leadership and women in business channels.
  • The Women in Business channel is designed to support the Laidlaw MBA Scholars; as well as information about how to apply for the scholarships, it will include content to inform, inspire and support more women gaining leadership roles in business, politics, not-for-profit and academia. We would be delighted if Network Members posted articles and videos related to women leaders.
  • The CBS scholars and alumni room is a private place where scholars can ask questions and receive advise from their peers and women in leadership positions. Survey results, copies of CBS Scholars presentations and details of networking events will all also be posted here.
  • A room specifically for university administrators and sponsors of Laidlaw Scholarship programmes to swap ideas, frustrations and best practise; chat and collaborate with each other easily; find up-to-date Laidlaw materials and guidelines. Administrators are encouraged to use this space to reach out to their peers and form working groups on leadership topics. The Laidlaw Foundation will post all new forms and reporting requirements here.
  • Intra and inter-university news and events will be posted on the site. We would love to see news of Members successes, awards, social activity and press mentions.


Site structure

Channels

The Network is divided into channels, ‘buckets’ of content into which you and your contributors can add posts, videos and documents. They give the site structure and guide community members on the topics they can expect to see covered on the site. Think of these as you would think of TV categories on Netflix. These are pages that arrange published content, in the same way film genres help arrange content on streaming sites, or research papers are posted on an online journal.

The Laidlaw Scholars Network has five channels, which are: Leadership, Research, Scholars’ stories, Women in Business and News & Events. In each, content is published on topics relevant to each channel. Inclusiveness and diversity, for example, is a common topic in the Women in Business channel. Notably, the Research channel has four different sub-channels associated with it. These are: Arts & Humanities, Medicine & Health, Social Sciences and STEM. These sub-channels contain research projects which explore topics ranging from language teaching and learning to machine learning.

When you produce a new piece of content, you can select to which channel or room you wish to publish it. Whilst you can technically publish to multiple channels, we strongly advice choosing the primary channel only.

Content published on channels can be made private and accessible to “members only”. After your content is published to the site, you will be able to “view” it. Once you land on the viewing page, you will then have the ability to “Admin” the content and set it to “Premium”.


Rooms

Rooms can be thought of as sub-communities of your wider community, a way to bring together users with shared interests or backgrounds. They can be open or closed (accessible by invitation only) and contain content, conversations and - for closed rooms - member and contributor directories. Notably, members are users that have the ability to view a private room, whereas contributors also have the ability to add content to a private room. It can be helpful to think of these spaces as WhatsApp groups.

To upload content to a room, click on the “add content” symbol on the top-right hand of the page, which is located by settings, and select the “Room” you want to add your content in on the editing page for that piece of content. You can only add content to a room of which you are a contributor. Please note that adding content to a room makes the content visible to members and contributors of that room only. This is why it is not advisable to add your research to a room.

At present, the Laidlaw Scholars Network has 17 different rooms, one for each university who currently offers the Laidlaw Programme, two for volunteering schemes offered to Laidlaw scholars, which are Raleigh International and Think Pacific, and two for university administrators, leadership developers and Laidlaw trustees to discuss next steps and provide feedback on the programme. All of our rooms are currently closed. 

To add users to a room, please email contact@laidlawscholars.com.


Badges

Badges are a great way of visually linking related content to help you find what you need. For example: in the “Research” and “Women in Business” channels, there may be posts that explore a “Humanities” topic. Although these pieces of content appear in different channels, they can be seen in the same page if clicking on the “Humanities” badge. To access a page for a badge, select a piece of content that contains that badge and then place your mouse on top of the badge.

You can search badges by the type of document (in grey) and topic of research (in colour). These types of badges can be added to your content in the editing page, where you can easily switch them on and off.


How do I use the Network?

Find people

There are two ways to search the network. 

The first involves using the green search toolbar in the homepage, which allows you to search by name, job title and organisation. If no results are displayed, please delete what you have typed and you will then be shown custom fields on the left-hand side of the page. These allow you to filter users by group, area of expertise, research topic and university. 

The second involves searching the directories “All Members” and “Universities & Partners”, which you can access on the left menu, by the “Laidlaw Scholars” logo. In the same way as the green toolbar on the homepage, directories allow you to filter content by custom fields, and to search users by their name, job title and organisation.


Post content

After you set up your profile, you will be able to upload content. 

Please upload your research as a pdf ‘document’. You’re free to write ‘posts’ too, and any other content that you think will help and/or inspire users. Notably, it is not possible to add a document to a post, so please make sure that your documents are uploaded in a pdf format as “documents”. As long as you have posted a document first, you can connect your post to the document so that if someone is reading your research post she or he will see the related document link.

When posting research documents, please select the channel ‘research’ and specify the area of research (also under channels), for example “social science”. In this way, your content will appear in the “research” carousel on the homepage, and in one of the four areas of research shown in the left menu. These include: Arts & Humanities, Medicine & Health, Social Sciences and STEM.

When publishing posts, please select the poster image that you would like to show as the header for that post. Although this is not compulsory, it does make the post look much better! If you do not have an image to upload that you would like to use for the poster, try searching www.unsplash.com for an appropriate copyright free image. Please do not use Google images which are copyright protected.

In addition to documents and posts, you are free to add videos to the Network. When adding a new video, you have the option to select between uploading a video or starting a video panel.

Video Panels allow up to nine users to engage with each other and video record a conversation.  You can start a video panel in three ways. The first is by starting a video panel under “My Videos”. Alternatively,  you can click the ‘start panel’ button on someone’s expert profile or click on your avatar in the top right corner of the screen and select the ‘My Video Panels’ button. 

You will then be taken through to the main video panel page. Select the ‘Create a video panel’ button and enter in a title for your panel. You then have the option to add up to 9 people to join the call but be aware that your invitees will need to be registered on the site.

The next step is to start your panel and click “join panel” to begin. You can re-use panels as many times as you like, for follow-up calls or regular meetings.

Do not forget to click ‘Record’ at the top of the page if you want to capture the meeting. When you’re done, press ‘Stop Recording’ and then ‘Recordings’ to access the final product.

When you select your video on the left side of the screen you will see that it is processing and this is nothing to worry about. The longer the recording the more processing there will be. While you are waiting for the processing you can enter your title, introduction and content below the video. You can also select a channel to add your content to and then press publish.

It is also possible to make your content, regardless of its format, accessible to “members only”. As mentioned above, you can make your content private to the network once it has been published by going to “my documents” or “my posts”, selecting “view”, “Admin” and setting the content to “Premium”. If you add content to a room which is closed, as all Network rooms are currently, only members of that room will be able to view the content.


Notification & Newsletter Emails

You are able to manage your Laidlaw Scholars Network account by accessing your account settings, where you can change your email or password, access your notification preferences or delete your account.

You are in charge of your Notification Preferences, which include the emails you would and would not like to receive from the Laidlaw Scholars Network.

Newsletters are round-ups of expertise from the Network that you can activate and deactivate. Once activated, you will be able to select the option to receive a newsletter email daily, weekly or monthly.


Please sign in

If you are a registered user on Laidlaw Scholars Network, please sign in