Since 1997, the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network has hosted the Institute for New Educational Developers (INED), a multi-day event intended to help people just entering the field. While each iteration of the INED is enacted in a highly localized and contextualized fashion, each seeks to address the needs of the intended…

Across higher education, educational developers and their supporting campus communities are being called upon to scale up evidence-informed practices, to enhance student experiences, and to document the changes. This article builds on the work of scholars who have taken up this evaluative challenge, by examining varied aspects of the evidencing…

As centers for teaching and learning increasingly offer support and leadership for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) at their institutions, educational developers need better tools to plan their SoTL programming. This article shares the work of a regional network of educational developers across six institutions in Virginia, who…

This mixed methods study explores the work and perspectives of curriculum developers, a subset of educational developers who support the development, revision, and/or renewal of academic degree programs and similar sequences, beyond an individual course. Thirty-five developers in the United States and Canada completed a survey addressing…

Despite its many benefits, curriculum review has yet to become a widespread practice in many areas of higher education. Previous research suggests that this is because of a lack of faculty time and expertise to conduct curriculum reviews independently. As such, this action research study builds on the existing literature to explore the utility of…

The Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) created a Small Teaching Challenge, leveraging department chairpersons to encourage faculty adoption of evidence-based, small teaching practices. Inspired by James Lang's "Small Teaching" (2016) and previous collaborations with department…

How faculty choose--or feel compelled--to spend time on preparing for and reflecting on their teaching is influenced both by capitalist notions of efficiency and productivity and by human, relationship-focused conceptions of growth. The educational development opportunities that faculty are offered at the intersection of these influences can…

Often working in multiple roles and operating at multiple scales, educational developers deal with layered tensions and a complex context that can be difficult for an individual or team to reconcile. In May 2020, the authors participated in a cross-institutional scholarly project, the Pandemic Educational Development Research Collaborative…

This brief piece has two purposes: to reflect on the argument in "What's the Problem Now?" (Bass, 2020) in light of the events of the past two years and to give that essay's core argument--that the problem of learning in higher education is a wicked problem--a more practical grounding for how it can shape the work of educational…

The global pandemic that began in 2020 amplified the chasm between higher education's stated goals to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and the systemic realities that many students, instructors, and staff grapple with on a daily basis. We contend that attenuating the barriers to DEI outcomes means first acknowledging that DEI is a…

In this article, the authors share the challenges we faced as we launched a center for teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we describe how we used design thinking as a strategy for working through these challenges. The article presents an overview of the design thinking process, a case study of our application of the process,…

This article describes the rationale, development process, and initial activities and outcomes of a faculty mentoring guild that engages experienced faculty volunteers in supporting their near peers in navigating their teaching, research, service, and life expectations and obligations. The purposes of this article are to: (1) describe the…

We share insights from a mixed methods study to describe the experience of educational developers participating in a community of practice (CoP). This CoP consisted of 19 leaders at eight institutions, serving collectively as facilitators of a hybrid, across-institutional, seven-week workshop series on course design for graduate students and…

In the library and information science (LIS) literature, there are examples of librarians leading educational development initiatives, often centered on information literacy (IL). However, there does not appear to have been significant exploration in the educational development literature of librarians acting as educational developers. This…

In times of crises, educational developers (EDs) work to ameliorate the teaching- and learning-related impacts caused by campus-wide disruptions such as health-related emergencies, mass shootings, and environmental disasters. These incidents may impact the personal-psychological factors and processes of EDs that, in turn, influence their…