In 2021, the Dutch Ministry of Education launched a financial incentive to promote virtual international student collaboration projects, known as Virtual Exchange or Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). The scheme encouraged educational developers' involvement in COIL design, although their role in international education is not well understood. This case study explores COIL collaboration among lecturers, an educational developer, and a student coach at a Dutch university of applied sciences. Findings reveal that while the educational developer improved constructive alignment within COIL practices, there is a lack of alignment with broader curriculum internationalisation. Moreover, the collaborative learning aspect in COIL was largely implicit; lecturers lacked familiarity with collaborative learning design and it was unclear whose responsibility it was to address this.
Drawing on autoethnographic analysis of navigating GenAI integration governance and faculty development at a regional Australian university, I apply threshold concept theory to faculty development. GenAI integration represents troublesome, transformative change challenging core assumptions about teaching, assessment design, and professional identity. Faculty anxiety, resistance, and confusion are necessary components of threshold crossing, not deficits requiring correction. Current skills-based approaches fail because they address technical competence while faculty face existential questions about professional relevance and educational purpose. I argue that academic developers must shift from instrumental training to identitAssociate Professor Prue Laidlaw, MEd, PhD, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and is Academic Director of Education Strategy at Charles Sturt University, a regional Australian institution. Her work bridges educational leadership and scholarship, focusing on faculty development and GenAI integration in higher education. She examines how institutional change occurs in teaching and assessment contexts. Her research encompasses teaching and learning scholarship, GenAI literacy, academic integrity, and transformative learning, with sustained commitment to equity and questioning dominant higher education narratives by supporting practices that honour liminality and recursive learning. How we support faculty transformation now, whether we reduce ontological change to technical skills acquisition or honour the messy, recursive work of professional identity reconstruction, will fundamentally shape higher education's GenAI-integrated future.
In academic development, women often carry the burden of unseen emotional labor, holding space for others while rarely being held themselves. This reflection, co-authored by two women from different cultural and institutional contexts, draws on lived experience and feminist ethics of care to call for sisterhood. Despite differences, the authors share common ground in the emotional toll of their work and the invisibility of their contributions. They argue for relationship-rich, emotionally sustaining collegiality. Reframing care as essential for survival, political, and sustaining, this piece offers a provocation: What might academic development look like if it centered on reciprocity, recognized emotional labor, and valued solidarity as scholarly practice? What if we led not with strategy - but with sisterhood?
Over the past two decades, educational leadership has increasingly been identified as a key factor in facilitating and enabling academic development. Nevertheless, the body of literature on the subject remains limited and reflects considerable ambiguity regarding how the relationship between educational leadership and academic development should be understood. For this special issue, we invited contributions that could advance our understanding of educational leadership from the perspective of academic developers. In this editorial, we present four distinct relational orientations between educational leadership and academic development. We argue that these configurations can serve a dual purpose: clarifying what forms of educational leadership are under discussion, and identifying areas in which further empirical and theoretical research are needed.
This reflection presents a case study from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University on implementing a large-scale institutional mandate for AI adoption in teaching, called the AI Champion Mentorship Program. Inspired by relational pedagogy and trust scholarship, we designed and launched an AI Champion Mentorship Program, intentionally brokering connections between novice and expert faculty in a year-long, structured partnership and mentoring relationship. So far, the results have been promising as a method of both individual growth and knowledge transfer. We advocate for academic developers to act as brokers who design for reciprocal value, psychological safety, and trust as the foundation for sustainable innovation.
Academic development involves creating conditions that support teaching and learning while aligning with institutional values. For new academic developers, epistemic reflexivity is crucial to align personal teaching philosophies with those of the university and create programs that support educators effectively. This paper documents how a new academic developer at an Australian university, in the absence of a formal Learning and Teaching Philosophy (LTP), engaged in epistemic reflexivity and analysed institutional documents to clarify the institution's educational philosophy. Guided by a conceptual framework, this approach facilitated alignment of institutional values with coherent professional development programs (PDPs), offering insights for others facing similar challenges.
This study explored viewpoints of university teachers from different countries on effective facilitation for problem- and project-based learning (PBL). Drawing upon complexity theory, the role of a PBL-facilitator is considered as a complex and dynamic system involving personal characteristics, relational capabilities, and contextual sources. The Q methodology was applied, connecting both qualitative and quantitative research characteristics. Twenty-nine university teachers from China, Denmark, India, Poland, and the Netherlands participated in the study. Three significantly distinguished collective factors were identified: (1) challenging students to reach their learning potentials; (2) supporting students' learning progress through feedback, resources, and ideas, and (3) caring for students as individuals by addressing their well-being, work-life balance, etc. The study also found a consensus across all three factors on key actions for effective facilitation, including establishing mutual expectations and assisting students in setting their learning goals. The findings suggest educators consider the three factors when crafting frameworks on facilitation for their own institutions and countries, aligning mutual expectations and seek common grounds with students, and leveraging professional learning communities to enhance open dialogues and share best practices for effective facilitation.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is enjoying considerable focus in Norway. The SoTL concept continues to evolve and to elude some higher education teachers. The aim of this interview study (n = 8) was to investigate conceptions of SoTL and perceived motivations, incentives, and barriers to SoTL engagement in a Norwegian context. Despite SoTL's lack of direct resonation with the participants, they articulated conceptions that represented aspects of SoTL in different ways. They also underlined motivations and incentives such as improving student learning and opportunities for career advancement and recognition, and barriers including limited time and knowledge, as well as lack of prestige and institutional valuing of SoTL. These insights may be of importance for academic developers supporting SoTL practitioners at their institutions, and contribute to discussions on SoTL in an international context.
The European Higher Education Area promotes active learning and student-centred learning, encouraging universities to adopt teaching strategies that enhance student engagement. In response, many institutions have introduced strategic frameworks to support instructional innovation. However, these efforts often lack grounding in empirical data on actual teaching practices, which can vary across disciplines. This study presents findings from a quantitative investigation at a single university, involving five departments representing the domains of social sciences, natural sciences, and medicine. The study examined the frequency of teaching strategies employed in lectures, with particular attention to disciplinary variation. Data were gathered through parallel questionnaires for students and teachers. Results revealed significant differences across disciplines. Participants in the social sciences and humanities reported more frequent use of active learning strategies, while natural sciences and medicine favoured lecture-based approaches. Perceptions also diverged between students and teachers, with students generally perceiving lecture-based approaches as more prevalent. The findings highlight the need for discipline-specific support and provide valuable insights for institutional planning and efforts to improve teaching quality.
Higher education remains largely student-centred. This paper argues that educators's care is central to the broader goal of student success, especially in the current challenging climate. Drawing from neuropsychology, I explore how an approach that encourages self-compassion over perfectionism offers a means of personal support and emotional sustainability, while we try as a collective to solve structural challenges in the sector. I describe practical actions and examples on how to include self-compassion in our daily lives as educators. I focus on how academic developers, when embedding self-compassion in their practice, can promote a wider cultural change in their institution.
Creating changes to optimize student learning often requires ongoing work of faculty members in collaboration with other members in their departments. Previous research has emphasized the effects of positive departmental climates, such as collegial relationships between instructors. However, less is known about how faculty members' perceptions of the departmental climate are aligned with their discussion networks for making changes in undergraduate education. Using two cases of STEM departments in an urban, public US university, responses from faculty members were compared based on their tenure system, focusing on their perceptions of collegiality among instructors and analyzing the network- and node-level patterns in their discussion network. Although faculty members reported positive views about collegiality in teaching in both departments, their discussion network revealed a tendency for homophilous interactions based on tenure classification. The differences in perceived collegiality between instructional faculty and tenure system faculty could be linked to their gaps in centrality scores within the discussion network. This study supports the importance of understanding faculty perceptions of collegial climate along with their discussions about making changes, which discloses group dynamics among faculty in the process of educational development.
This article reflects on the practice of networks and the involvement of the disabled academic from the lived-experience perspective of a disabled scholar. The disabled person has rarely been considered in the developmental literature about inclusivity and the organisation of professional networks, in terms of conceptualising the challenges to engagement, or with regard to accessing the benefits participation brings to progress a scholar's career. I discuss some of the barriers that can exist, to frame the challenges that must be considered to engage and draw benefits from networks for disabled scholars. I identify where the agenda should be advanced, for example by expanding an understanding of the implications of disabling barriers.
We explore three examples of teaching-development activities that aim to promote discussions about teaching among academic staff across several Norwegian Earth System Science departments. The three events are a conference-like annual gathering of students and staff from across the country, a monthly Teaching and Learning themed Journal Club held at a large department with a wide range of research interests, and a monthly 'Teachers' Breakfast' at a smaller, specialised department. We explore the impact of these events on attendees through self-reported changes in how they think about teaching and learning and their practices, and the indirect reach through discussions outside the events. We find that the level of self-reported impact corresponds to the scale of the events, and that the different events have qualitatively different types of impact. The annual gathering affects how teachers view students; the Teachers' Breakfasts develop a departmental Community of Practice around teaching; Journal Club attendees develop a broader view of what it means to be an academic scientist through encounters with a different area of relevant scholarship.
