1. Dr Kerry Dobbins Dr Lynnette Matthews PedRIO Conference, Nov 2018
‘I now realise how important it is to collect data from students’: making research-informed practice a priority for ‘institutional excellence’
Dr Kerry Dobbins
Dr Lynnette Matthews
PedRIO Conference, Nov 2018

2. SoTL can be the vehicle through which ‘achieving and understanding ‘institutional excellence’ becomes a collective and research-informed endeavour’.
Raising individual capacity to engage in SoTL
Embedding SoTL within departmental and institutional practices

3. UoL’s Postgraduate Certificate
‘One way [to develop SoTL capacity] is to design professional development programmes as opportunities to scaffold project-based scholarly investigations into academic practice, which take academics’ context- and practice-specific learning and teaching problems, challenges, and opportunities as their points of departure.’
Geertsema (2016), p.130

4. Institutional Excellence
‘…in order to have an impact on a particular culture, teachers engaging in scholarship at a local level…are probably the most important category.’
Mårtensson et al. (2011), p.60
‘In fostering such local knowledge creation, we foster work that advances ‘the state of the art’, not necessarily in the disciplinary field, but in the university as a community of knowledge. It is a question not of building individual expertise only, but a collective expertise…’
Geertsema (2016), p.129

5. Institutional Sharing
Teaching enhancement project fund
Staff-student partnership projects – DIP scheme
In-house journal
JLTHE
Annual T&L conference
Action research module

6. Embedding SoTL within departmental and institutional practices
There is a lack of clarity about what SoTL is and what it entails;
Public discourse about SoTL does not always seem to match reward and recognition processes (bias still towards research rather than teaching achievements in promotion decisions);
SoTL needs to be more tightly coupled to development, excellence and promotion frameworks.
Fanghanel et al. (2016), p.5

7. Embedding it within current structures, processes, etc.
Embedding SoTL within departmental and institutional practices
Defining SoTL.
Embedding it within current structures, processes, etc.
Working with range of relevant committees, depts, etc.

8. Reference list
Fanghanel, J., Pritchard, J., Potter, J., & Wisker, G. (2016) Defining and supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL): a sector-wide study. Higher Education Academy: (accessed 13/11/18).
Geertsema, J. (2016) Academic development, SoTL and educational research. International Journal for Academic Development, 21:2,
Mårtensson, K., Roxå, T., & Olsson, T. (2011) Developing a quality culture through the scholarship of teaching and learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 30:1,
Please feel free to contact me to continue the discussion:
Dr Kerry Dobbins