Nearly every university now houses a unit dedicated to helping academics teach better — variously called a Teaching Innovation Unit, Centre for Teaching and Learning, Academic Development Centre, or Educational Development Office. Most academics have a vague sense it exists and almost never use it, which is a significant waste. These units employ specialists — learning designers, educational technologists, academic developers — whose entire job is to make your teaching more effective, and who are typically underused precisely by the busy academics who would benefit most.
This article explains what these units genuinely offer and, more importantly, how to extract real value from yours rather than treating it as a compliance office or a training service you attend under duress. The academics who build a working relationship with their teaching unit teach better, win teaching grants, and build the evidence that advances their careers. For the wider picture, see our Teaching & Assessment collection.
What a Teaching Innovation Unit actually is
A Teaching Innovation Unit is a central service staffed by professionals whose expertise is teaching and learning itself, rather than any single discipline. Where a chemistry professor is an expert in chemistry who also teaches, the people in a TIU are experts in how people learn, how to design effective courses, how to assess validly, and how to use educational technology well. They exist because good teaching is a genuine specialism, and because leaving every academic to work it out alone from instinct wastes enormous effort re-solving problems the field already solved.
Crucially, a good TIU is a support and partnership function, not a policing one. The most common reason academics avoid these units is a misconception that engaging them signals a deficiency or invites surveillance of their teaching. In reality their role is developmental — they partner with you to improve, usually confidentially, and the strongest teachers use them most, not least. Understanding this distinction is the first step to using the unit well: it is a resource you deploy, not an inspection you endure. Many such units publish their offerings openly, as the University of New South Wales does through its teaching support hub at teaching.unsw.edu.au.
The services a TIU offers
The range is broader than most academics realise. At the individual level, TIUs typically offer confidential consultations on course and assessment design, peer observation and feedback on your teaching, help redesigning a course that is not working, and guidance on specific problems — a high failure rate, disengaged students, an assessment that is generating complaints. Many provide formal qualifications in higher-education teaching, increasingly expected or required for probation and promotion, and run workshops on everything from inclusive teaching to assessment integrity in the age of generative AI.
At the programme and institutional level they support curriculum design and review, lead the rollout of new educational technologies and learning platforms, and administer teaching grants and awards. They are also the institutional memory of what works: they have seen hundreds of courses and can tell you what has been tried, what failed, and what the evidence says. Tapping that accumulated knowledge before you reinvent a solution — or repeat a known mistake — is one of the highest-return uses of the unit. The formative-assessment techniques we cover in our guide to engagement are exactly the kind of practice a TIU can help you implement well.
Working effectively with learning designers
The learning designer (or instructional designer) is the TIU professional academics most often work with directly, especially when building or redesigning online and blended courses, and the relationship works best when you understand what each party brings. You are the subject-matter expert: you own the content, the disciplinary standards, and what students must be able to do. The learning designer owns the pedagogy and the structure: how to sequence the material, design activities that produce learning, align assessment to outcomes, and use the platform effectively. It is a genuine partnership of two expertises, not a service where you hand over content and receive a course back.
Get the most from it by engaging early and treating the designer as a collaborator rather than a technician. Bring them your learning outcomes and your problems, not a finished course to merely upload. Be open about what is not working and willing to have your assumptions challenged — the designer's outside pedagogical perspective is precisely the value, and defending your existing habits wastes it. The best collaborations happen when the academic supplies deep content expertise and clear goals, and the designer supplies the pedagogical architecture, each respecting the other's domain. This same alignment discipline underpins competency-based approaches like those we describe in our overview of competency-based education.
Getting funding for teaching innovation
Many academics do not realise that money is available specifically for improving teaching, and that the TIU is usually the gateway to it. Internal teaching-development grants, faculty innovation funds, and national teaching grant schemes exist across most systems to support course redesign, educational research, and the development of new teaching approaches. These are frequently under-subscribed relative to research funding because fewer academics apply, which means the odds can be surprisingly good for a well-crafted proposal — and the TIU knows exactly how to craft one.
Approach teaching grants with the same seriousness as research funding. A strong proposal identifies a genuine teaching problem, proposes an evidence-informed intervention, and — critically — includes a plan to evaluate whether it worked. The TIU can help you shape the pedagogy, design the evaluation, and navigate the scheme's expectations, dramatically improving your chances. Managing the reporting on such a grant is straightforward when you keep structured records from the start; AcademicStaff's grant progress-report generator helps you turn your ongoing project notes into the interim and final reports these schemes require, so the administrative tail of a teaching grant does not consume the time you won it to spend on teaching.
Turning teaching into scholarship
One of the most career-relevant things a TIU offers is help turning your teaching practice into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning — investigating your own teaching systematically and publishing the results. This matters enormously for academics whose institutions reward teaching in promotion, because SoTL converts the teaching you already do into research outputs and evidence of teaching excellence simultaneously. A course redesign becomes a study; the improvement in student outcomes becomes publishable data; your teaching case for promotion gains the kind of rigorous evidence committees respect.
The TIU supports this at every stage: framing a researchable question about your teaching, designing an ethical and valid study, navigating the ethics approval that studying your own students requires, analysing the data, and finding the right journals and conferences. Many academics have strong teaching insights that never become scholarship simply because they do not know this pathway exists or find the research design daunting. The unit removes those barriers. This scholarship becomes powerful evidence in exactly the way we describe in our promotion dossier checklist, transforming teaching from an unevidenced claim into a documented strength. Quality bodies increasingly expect this evidentiary stance, as reflected in the standards maintained by regulators such as TEQSA.
When to engage your TIU in the course cycle
Timing determines how much value you extract. The most common and costly mistake is engaging the TIU too late — arriving two weeks before term with a course already built, asking them to fix problems that are now baked into the design. Learning designers and academic developers can help far more at the design stage, before decisions harden, than during frantic mid-semester repair. The ideal engagement point is when you are planning or substantially redesigning a course, months ahead, when outcomes, assessment, and structure are still fluid.
Build the relationship as an ongoing one rather than an emergency call. A brief consultation when you first take over a course, a peer observation partway through, a debrief on the data after it runs, and a redesign conversation before the next iteration create a continuous improvement loop that compounds over years. The academics who treat their TIU as a standing partner — looped in at each stage of the course cycle — steadily outteach those who only call when something breaks. Make the first appointment now, while nothing is on fire, and you will discover the unit is one of the most useful and underused resources your institution offers.
The Course Redesign Planning Pack
A structured planning template for working with a learning designer — mapping outcomes to activities and assessment, an engagement-timing checklist for the course cycle, and a teaching-grant proposal outline.
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Frequently asked questions
Will using the Teaching Innovation Unit make me look like a weak teacher?
No — the opposite. TIUs are developmental partners, not policing bodies, and their consultations are typically confidential. The strongest teachers use them most, treating them as a resource to sharpen already-good practice rather than a remedial service. Avoiding the unit for fear of appearing deficient is a costly misconception that deprives you of expert support your institution is paying to provide.
When is the best time to involve a learning designer in my course?
As early as possible — ideally at the planning or redesign stage, months before delivery, while outcomes, assessment and structure are still fluid. Learning designers add far more value shaping a course than repairing one already built. Arriving two weeks before term with a finished course limits them to patching problems that are already baked into the design.
Can a Teaching Innovation Unit help my case for promotion?
Significantly. Beyond improving your teaching, TIUs help you turn practice into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning — publishable studies of your own teaching that serve as rigorous evidence of teaching excellence. They also administer teaching grants and awards. Both produce exactly the documented, evidenced teaching achievements that promotion committees respect far more than student satisfaction scores alone.
The AcademicStaff editorial team writes practical, evidence-based guidance for university staff — drawing on sector reporting, funder guidelines and the lived administrative reality of academic work. Every guide is reviewed for accuracy against current Australian higher-education practice.