This project addresses the need for academics to become qualified university teachers so that they can effectively facilitate student learning. The project aims to prepare, test and evaluate a plan for making development of university teachers holistic and sustainable. This includes first preparing curricula of new educational development courses/workshops for university teachers, undergoing an international accreditation of the courses and piloting them with at least 50 doctoral students and beginner teachers from two universities. Second, we will design a plan for making student feedback continuously enhance quality of teaching and learning and test the plan with 40 or more courses in two participating universities. Third, we will undertake two scholarly studies: a study into the impact of the newly introduced ED initiatives and a study evaluating the effectiveness of mechanisms that support pedagogical conversations and informal learning among university teachers. Finally, under this project, we will design a plan for identifying, selecting and rewarding excellence in teaching and start implementing the plan within at least two participating organisations. Through providing a more integrated approach to staff development, we expect to prepare significantly more university teachers for new challenges of current times, including teaching large student groups, teaching online and helping students to become effective life-long learners. Teachers will be able to design courses so that they meet high-quality standards. They will also be able to use student-centred teaching methods and some of them will even be able to implement the "students as partners" approach. Teachers recognised for their excellence will lead and inspire further colleagues to come up with innovative classes. Most importantly, we assume to achieve a synergic effect when student feedback helps to enhance teaching, and good teaching feeds into enhanced motivation and increased student effort while learning. The project will thus create conditions for continuous enhancement of student learning experience and learning outcomes.
We wanted to design a complex system of ED activities interconnected by measures supporting informed pedagogical conversations that would help to regularly incorporate the results of student feedback evaluations into teaching and learning activities. Student feedback was supposed to be the driving stimulus that would make the system sustainable in its complexity in the long run, together with the increased motivation thanks to a suitable system of rewarding excellence in teaching. Analysing the process of piloting the designed activities was an important part of intellectual outputs in order to identify the main factors influencing the effects of their implementation compared to the experience with similar activities in universities where they had been long established. The key outcome expected from the project was enhanced student learning, which we planned to achieve as a result of the following: 1) significantly improved pedagogical knowledge and skills of teaching staff, 2) improved system of student feedback evaluation, 3) introduction of mechanisms supporting pedagogical conversations, 4) rewarding excellent teachers to motivate them to introduce innovative and effective teaching and learning methods in their practice.
The main idea behind the project was captured directly in its title. It reacted to several isolated educational development (ED) initiatives at Slovak universities which had successfully reached their objectives but were closely tied to time-limited project funding and represented only partial solutions to the various problems faced by higher education institutions. The discussions after a successful completion of a project of this kind at University of Economics in Bratislava (UEB) resulted in questions whether and how an already well-established system of educational development working successfully in other countries could be used in a different organizational culture in a country where educational development has almost no tradition. The idea seemed interesting from both sides – Slovak partner organizations could serve for testing the adoption of a systematic solution from abroad with expected benefits for their teaching and learning environments, and on the other hand, experienced educational developers and researchers from the other partner organizations could examine how the solutions from their own practice and the research results from established environments will work in universities with little experience in the area.