A Collaborative Work Embedded Approach To Professional Development

An ever increasingly diverse age, cultural and socio-economic student population has created a need for Australian Universities to reassess the educational processes that become part and parcel of the daily internal concern of the university. These processes can be summed up as teaching and learning effectiveness. Until the late eighties professional development for academics remained as a low priority, the long standing tradition being that specialised subject expertise was enough to qualify a person to teach at a university level. Presently professional opportunities have been made readily available for Australian engineering academics through the Centre for Higher Education Development. However the focus has generally been on content rather than teaching and learning. Therefore the appropriateness and effectiveness of some professional development has become a significant cause for concern. It is not surprising to find that the majority of Australian engineering educators have no formal teaching qualifications, having entered into the world of academia as a postgraduate student or directly from industry. This has also accentuated the misalignment of some current professional development with educators’ individual teaching needs.