Transforming teaching practice in independent providers

Now more than ever, stakeholder pressure demands that higher education courses are taught by qualified, competent professionals. 

Students’ expectations are for academic staff who have expertise and knowledge about their subject area who can also adapt their teaching practice to reflect learning challenges and respond to individual students’ needs and differences, ultimately to get the best out of their cohorts.

The stakes are particularly high for those seeking Degree Awarding Powers (DAPs) – the criteria for which requires a provider to have ‘a cohesive academic community’ – who strive to cultivate flourishing academic environments in support of this aim.

But how can higher education institutions maintain and enhance their teaching quality and commit to meaningful staff development against a backdrop of increasing sector demands?

Meeting the challenge

For larger institutions - with more staff and more internal resources - they often meet this challenge head on. For example, some institutions set up, maintain and accredit their own internal Advance HE Fellowship schemes to enable their staff to gain professional recognition for their teaching experience. Under this guidance and within this framework of support, academic teaching teams can improve their own teaching approach and build this into their own practice. 

Larger institutions might also support staff to complete their own direct applications to Advance HE for Fellowship, while some may set up a full PGCert degree course for their internal teams focused on the latest teaching methods. 

These routes work well where institutional scale (and income) allows for staff development models to be developed internally in order to meet strategic objectives such as maintaining status as a teaching-intensive provider, or a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) Gold rating.

Smaller, independent providers face a different set of challenges. Many academic staff in these settings may have come straight from industry, or be teaching on a part-time, associate or visiting lecturer basis. While they bring significant subject knowledge, some may have less experience of teaching practice or of being a student themselves on a higher education degree course. 

The benefits of outsourcing

One option for providers is to outsource the academic development of staff altogether and offer the opportunity to achieve a degree qualification in higher education teaching via an external provider. This can help to raise the quality and reputation of teaching excellence in smaller institutions, while saving on the significant costs of in-house methods. Providers can meet stakeholder requirements for showing staff competence in teaching while also transforming the teaching practice of academics, helping less experienced staff to meet requirements and more experienced staff to move into new areas like curriculum development, inclusive pedagogy, and online learning.

While there is a cost to the provider, this is much lower than the cost of setting up and delivering their own programme. Providers can also adopt a strategic approach by investing in key staff to complete a course, who then cascade the learning they gain to colleagues throughout the institution. And, as an additional benefit, if the qualification is offered flexibly as an online course, staff will not have to leave the institution to travel to the external provider, saving additional costs.

Why Falmouth?

Falmouth University has been offering a flexible, online distance learning PGCHE course since 2018. It’s a tried and tested approach which has helped hundreds of people around the world – including those working in independent providers, including many IHE Members – to transform their teaching practice and gain professional recognition for teaching competence.

As the degree qualification is delivered online, staff can fit it flexibly around personal and professional commitments and undertake the learning activities at times that best suit their lifestyles.

What makes Falmouth’s online PGCHE particularly effective? Firstly, the combination of staff development with a teaching qualification makes for a highly motivating environment, which helps address the common issue of poor completion rates. Motivation stems from the authentic learning environment, where participants are developing their own practice in their own context and assessed as students on an academic degree programme alongside other professional higher education teaching staff – a community of peers who inspire excellence. Secondly, the online nature of Falmouth’s course brings together different staff from a huge range of academic disciplines and different higher education providers across the UK and globally. This diversity allows both individual staff and the wider institution to benefit from exposure to a broad spectrum of teaching practices, which can be applied to enrich their own approaches.

For independent providers with unique needs and more limited resources, Falmouth’s online PGCHE offers a proven pathway to transform teaching practice with lasting benefits for staff, students and institutions alike. 

Andy Peisley is Course Leader for the PGCHE (Online) at Falmouth University