Educational Development Units: Aiming for a Balanced Approach to Supporting Teaching

ABSTRACT

Educational Development Units (EDUs) exist in most Australian universities and are playing a role in supporting teaching at the institutional level. There is a tension within many such units between working with individual academics at the grassroots level and being more influential at the institutional level. Some writers in the field have been critical of units which operate at the individual consultancy level, suggesting that such an approach limits their overall impact at the institutional level. In this article, a brief case study is used to illustrate that these two levels of action should be seen as complementary and that both levels of action are necessary to support efforts to enhance the quality of university teaching.