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Institute of Teaching and Learning

Pure Profiles for Teaching and Scholarship

What is a Pure Profile?

The University of Manchester uses the Research Explorerweb portal which allowsanyone (internally or externally) to find our staff online. All academic staff are entitled to have a profile page, which we call a Pure Profile.You can see some examples of Pure Profiles from teaching colleagues below to get a sense of what this looks like. 

If you have not done so already, you will need to make your Pure Profile publicly visible, so that it can be searched and found using the search engine on Research Explorer, or any web search engine.You will also need to manually populate your profile with relevant information, and if you have any outputs identified through an Orcid ID these can be imported into your Pure Profile.

We provide more information here, but please also consult the primary source of information about this, the University’s Pure Support Pages.

You may also find this online introductory short course useful- (please note that at the moment this is framedfor researchers specifically, but it is applicable to all academic staff). 

Why have a Pure Profile?

We encourage all academic staff to have a Pure Profile for a number of reasons: 

  • Public Profile: Your Pure Profile is the primary way for anyone, internal or external, to find out about your teaching and scholarship, to understand your expertise, and to find out how to contact you too.  
  • Students: Your students, or students looking to study with you, will find the information on your Pure Profile valuable.  
  • Collaboration: Your profile can be helpful for those looking for colleagues to collaborate on scholarship activities within the University and beyond.  
  • Celebrating your achievements: Pure profiles are an excellent place to record your achievements. From professional qualifications to awards, and all forms of dissemination of your teaching and scholarship (internal and external, formal and informal), Pure is an important place to record these so that others can share and celebrate your achievements.  
  • Sharing best practice: Pure Profiles are a valuable source of information for colleagues looking for exemplars of excellent teaching and scholarship (both internally and externally). 
  • Professional Development: It can be helpful to keep this updated for your own professional development, so that your expertise is clear to all, and to help you reflect on future areas for development. It is also possible to export all of your Pure data at any time into a Word or PDF format document.  

What kind of time investment will be needed?

It should only take a few minutes to activate your profile if you have not already done so. Once you have done this, as a minimum, we ask all staff to add teaching to their profiles in the following 3 ways:  

1. Experience of teaching at the UoM  

2. Teaching qualification and/or Advance HE fellowship  

3. Scholarship of teaching and learning  

Adding these three as an expert user of Pure will take approximately 30 minutes. Time required for a new user may take longer. The time to complete your profile also depends on the amount of scholarship you want to add to your profile. 

We then recommend taking an hour or two once each year (or more regularly if you wish) to update your profile. You may want to do this around the time of your PDR to help reflect on achievements and goals, but it is entirely up to you and dependent on your own schedule as to when this might be best.  

What next?

All of the information you need to activate, populate, maintain and enhance your Pure profile can be found on the University’s Pure website, including specific guidance about activating your profile and adding teaching and scholarship. 

Pure Profile Teaching and Scholarship exemplars

Studies have repeatedly shown how varied and diverse teaching focused academic profiles can be so we share here a series of exemplars from teaching and scholarship colleagues to highlight and celebrate this diversity, and to demonstrate how to use your Pure Profile effectively.