How to Support and to Bring About the Shift from Teaching to Learning through Academic Staff Development Programmes: Examples and Perspectives

Abstract

This article opens with a survey of developments indicative of the shift from teaching to learning. It then surveys the situation in the 1990s and answers questions relevant to the encouragement of effective teaching. It continues by dealing with the question of how to encourage the shift from teaching to learning by means of staff development programmes for higher education teaching personnel. The author presents successful concepts that she developed in the context of a pilot study undertaken between 1975 and 1979. She applied them within workshops not only in her own university but in numerous eastern European and African universities and at the University of the Philippines in 1997 and 1998. A final section summarizes some perspectives for the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education: Higher Education in the Twenty‐First Century‐‐"Vision and Action' that was held in Paris from 5 to 9 October 1998.