Currently reading Harvey et al. (2026) on “What is good academic development practice? Introducing Australasian standards”

I just saw that Kjersti, Cathy’s and my article has been replaced as the latest publication on IJAD’s website, and that “What is good academic development practice? Introducing Australasian standards” by Harvey et al. (2026) has been published on the first of January this year! Which I of course have to read right away, because who doesn’t love the opportunity to reflect on their own practice?

The article starts out with describing academic development as quite a difficult profession, where academic developers have to be “flexible generalists” that can respond to the “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous higher education context”, while universities tend to focus more and more on value for money (which reminded me of the Harvey & Stensaker (2008) paper on quality cultures in academia, but turns out that that was a different Harvey). But so far, there are no established standards or benchmarking tools for academic developments, so it is difficult to argue for more resources or even the existence of academic development units, and also for individual academic developers it is difficult to position their work relative to what others do, or use others as “aspirational reference for their activities” (although there are a bunch of aspirational references that I personally have, not least the Contemporary Approaches to University Teaching MOOC).

Anway. To address this gap, Harvey et al. (2026) try to define good practice in academic development in this article. They do that based on criteria for existing awards for related achievements (e.g., contribution to an organisation, student partnerships, teaching and learning more generally) and formulate their own:

• Principles of good learning and teaching: grounded in context, modeling and extending documented principles of good teaching, and a scholarly approach.
• Impact: “demonstrating the reach and evaluating the outcomes and effects” through both quantitative measures of the scale and reach of the initiative, such as attendance, and qualitative measures, such as transforming participants’ undestanding.
• Distinctive and/or innovative practice: Distinctive means that while something can build on good practice elsewhere (and needs to acknowledge it!), it is adapted specifically to the local context, target audience, strategic priorities; Innovative means novel.

They then test this against real nomiations for an award for good practices in academic development and against 65 academic developers in an online workshop (love how they always do the peer feedback in their work, also in the Contemporary Approaches to University Teaching MOOC!). This led to the addition of a fourth criterion:

• Evaluation and reflection, which are planned for and enacted throughout the whole process

This framework can now be used for (self)assessment of initiatives and many other purposes.

As I said, it is very hard for me to resist a nice list and reflection prompts, so there are a two subcriteria for impact (from their Table 1) that I want to highlight.

Subcriterion 3.1 states “A clear and feasible strategy to attract and engage participants is articulated in the design“. This is something where there is a lot of room for improvement in our work! We often rely on participants having to take our courses because they need to demonstrate pedagogical development for promotion, and when we offer formats that do not count towards that, there is no clear strategy. Of course many teachers seek out professional development opportunities by themselves (and manage to find them on our calendar or website), but we don’t have good communication channels to reach all teachers, and we don’t have a good comprehensive understanding of what their needs are (even though we do have an idea about teachers’ needs relating to specific topics, for example regarding teaching for sustainability, through studies like Thoni (2025) and Glessmer et al. (2025)).

Subcriterion 3.2. is “The intended or enacted scale and reach of the practice is appropriate to the size and need of the cohort (given the available capacity and resourcing).” Ignoring the stuff in parantheses for a minute, this is a real problem. A lot of what we do requires close collaboration with teachers on their SoTL projects, and there is of course a limit to how many close relationships any academic developer can maintain in parallel over time. With the initiative Teaching for Sustainability, we try to build a community of practice where there are a lot of close relationships among teachers (and including us, of course) so that more and more SoTL collaborations are carried by the community rather than by us, but building that community takes time. A second attempt to scale our work so that it is “appropriate to the size and need of the cohort” is the development of our MOOC, so that at least the initial contact with the topic does not rely so much on us being available in person (although we try to be authentic and approachable in the MOOC, so that the step from taking the MOOC and reaching out to us for discussions in real life is as small as possible). But this is a very difficult balance that I’m currently struggling with (see also my last post last year) — given my capacity and resources, how can I balance the closeness of relationships that I want to offer to teachers with the sheer number of teachers that would like to have (such) a relationship? “Such” in the previous sentence in paranthesis because clearly the relationships need to change if there is less time available for each of them… At the same time, I get so much feedback that teachers really appreciate close, personal relationships because that is where they feel seen and supported. Long story short: being able to balance the needs and numbers of teachers with the available capacities and resources is definitely a good criterion for good academic development, and something that I really need to figure out for myself!

So in conclusion: I think this is a really useful framework to reflect on my own practice, and it would be so much fun to write a new teaching (or academic development) portfolio to really articulate what I am doing and why! I would also really like to explore the Sandri (2022) iceberg and start from an exploration of teaching philosophy and the lenses I use to look at my teaching (and the world), from that reflect on the approaches to teaching I take, and then what that means for the actual teaching I do… Maybe that’s a project for next weekend!

Harvey, M., Hamilton, J., & Adam, A. (2026). What is good academic development practice? Introducing Australasian standards. International Journal for Academic Development, 1-15.

Featured image is my favourite view a couple of days ago (before the snow came!) on the walk to a morning dip. Ice on the beach though!

And a Christmas tree that doesn’t look nearly as inviting as it did back when it was sunny…

I love dramatic skies!