The UNSW SoTL series: building a University-wide community of teaching and learning scholars
A/Prof. Anna Rowe, Dr Benjamin Phipps, Meredith MacAulay
Are you interested in improving your students’ learning experience? Curious about how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) could inform and enhance your teaching practice? Perhaps you’re already engaged in SoTL but looking for ways to share your work, connect with colleagues, and build your confidence in this space? The UNSW SoTL series was designed with exactly these goals in mind.
SoTL - A key driver of career development and curriculum transformation
As university educators respond to challenges in the higher education sector, they are navigating significant shifts in teaching and assessment practices, including the integration of artificial intelligence. In this context, SoTL is playing an increasingly important role in shaping both individual and institution-wide pedagogical development. SoTL is widely recognised as key to building academic capability in evidence-informed teaching across disciplines and supporting high-quality student learning (Diery et al., 2020). Scholarly informed teaching is also a core principle of the Higher Education Standards Framework and helps sustain educational quality at UNSW by connecting local practice with broader sector trends.
As UNSW gears up to move to a new Flex-Semester academic calendar, the principles of evaluation, reflection and evidence which are integral to SoTL, play an important role in improving teaching and learning in targeted ways. Indeed, SoTL is a powerful driver of educational excellence, centring student and educator voices, deepening understanding of how higher education is experienced, and identifying effective designs and practices that can be adapted or scaled to enhance the impact of education on students' lives in rigorous ways.
UNSW SoTL series
Launched in 2024, the UNSW SoTL Series offers professional development, leadership, networking and dissemination opportunities to all staff (academic and third-space professionals) who are interested in SoTL. Since its inception, the series has featured over 30 sessions, delivered by more than 50 colleagues from every faculty, as well as central units including the Library, Pro Vice-Chancellor Education Portfolio, and Research, Ethics and Compliance Support. The series encompasses a variety of formats including presentations, workshops, and information and drop-in sessions, consistent with research highlighting the value of professional development initiatives that are flexible, informal, and well structured (Smith & Wyness, 2024).
Topics have spanned a diverse array of areas, including action research, discipline-based educational research, programmatic approaches to assessment, evaluation, methods, publishing in SoTL and navigating human research ethics (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Top 50 words from SoTL series session titles 2024-2026
In 2025, a ‘HERDSA Highlights’ session was piloted, offering UNSW staff presenting at the annual conference of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) the opportunity to share their work through short internal presentations. This initiative enabled colleagues unable to attend the conference to engage with recent educational scholarly work at UNSW and provided a mechanism for funded attendees to extend the reach and impact of their conference participation across the broader UNSW community. The popular event will be held again at the end of this year.
Impact of the SoTL series
The SoTL series supports individual professional growth while contributing to broader conversations about teaching and learning culture across the institution, reflecting SoTL’s role in academic development and scholarly teaching communities (Geertsema, 2016). Engagement has remained strong, with over 200 attendees each year, creating a community for curiosity, sharing and collaboration across the university. Feedback from post-session surveys has been overwhelmingly positive, with participants rating the sessions 4.9 out of 5 overall and the likelihood of applying insights to their own work at 4.5 out of 5.
Participants have particularly valued the opportunity to network and grow, as reflected by this testimonial from Dr Gabi Nudelman (Faculty of Business):
“I’ve really valued attending the SoTL series presentations this year. It is great to have an opportunity to come together with like-minded colleagues to grow my SoTL skills and knowledge. There’s so much to learn, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to extend myself, grow community, and consider possibilities for future projects."
Presenters, too, have benefited from the opportunity to share their research-to-practice dissemination locally and demonstrate impact in their own institution.
"Presenting at the SoTL series was an invaluable opportunity to share the early analysis of a multi-year project before submitting it for publication. The session offered the rare benefit of engaging with dedicated educators who not only discovered new methodological possibilities in terms of educational research but also provided incisive, constructive feedback in a genuinely collegial environment."- Dr Felipe Balotin Pinto (Pro Vice-Chancellor Education Portfolio).
Other notable impacts to come out of the series, include improved institutional ethics review processes for SoTL research projects, and opportunities for Education Focussed academics to join ethics review panels.
The series forms part of a broader suite of SoTL capability-building initiatives at UNSW, which were shortlisted for an Australasian Academic Development Good Practice Award from the Council of Australasian University Leaders in Learning and Teaching (CAULLT) in 2025.