As the Higher Education (HE) landscape continues to change, excellent teaching has become increasingly important. The increased epistemological access to significantly socially and educationally diverse students necessitates new, relevant, and responsive teaching methods. Additionally, COVID-19 has affected the use of modern technologies and alternative interaction between students and their teachers. The importance of excellent teaching, the need for modern technologies, and new interactions call for expansion and revised teaching development initiatives. The teaching development initiatives cater to reskilling and upskilling academics, development of new pedagogical strategies, and illuminating the academics’ intellectual curiosity to respond to these imperatives.
TEP comprises of 5 Short Learning Programmes (SLPs) which aim to be relevant and responsive to the HE imperatives and the drastically changing HE landscape. The purposes of the SLPs had been intentionally conceptualised individually and as a holistic offering of 5 SLPs to enable continuing professional development and lifelong learning opportunities for academics at all levels, and to create pathways for development and growth.
Pedagogy and theoretical underpinning
The programme is underpinned by a socio-cultural understanding of teaching and learning. It is envisaged as a structure or space created by academic developers for the collaborative pursuit of a whole institution educational development approach with teaching and learning at its core (with reference to De Andrea & Gosling 2005).
TEP aims to enable collaboration with academics on their journey to becoming expert university teachers, in transforming their teaching to respond to their students' learning needs by adopting a scholarly approach to their teaching and engaging in the scholarship of learning and teaching. The SLPs are designed to realise our mission to empower academics to design relevant, responsive, and innovative curricula, and employ learning, teaching, and assessment approaches that are informed by humanizing, socially just, scholarly, and reflective practices.
The bouquet of short learning programmes (SLPs) includes the following areas of development and support required for academic advancement:
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The Higher Education Context
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Learning and Teaching in Higher Education
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Assessment in Higher Education
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Curriculum in Higher Education
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Research in Higher Education
Each SLP provides the balance between the knowledge and skills of each element of HE and the selection of the teaching, learning and assessment approaches were carefully considered to align with the outcomes and the associated content.
The content presented in each SLP is responsive to the HE landscapes, whist considering the current lived experiences of academics. TEP encourages holistic engagement with the SLPs through deliberately encouraging academics to interrogate their current practices rigorously and reflexively in order to develop and innovatively enhance their praxis.
The design of each SLP establishes the possibility of being presented individually and/or as a sequenced academic development initiative.