LAUSR

The articles in this issue are all firmly situated in the complex world of higher education. Each contribution explores a challenge that has the potential of being turned into an opportunity. Thus, taking the challenge of implementing new technologies as their point of departure, Roeland van der Rijst, Yvette Baggen, and Ellen Sjoer explore academics’ motivation to learn and develop professionally as they implement smallscale curriculum innovations. Two further articles focus on the implications of evolving technologies for academic practice. Christine Slade, Susan Rowland, and Dominic McGrath focus on contract cheating in the form of pay-per-use services that provide students with custom-produced assessment items. Since these ‘high-tech’ practices cannot be detected through conventional means, verification of student authorship is needed, which requires rethinking assessment design and thereby provides an opportunity to enhance practice. In her article on Twitter, Maureen O’Keeffe examines the challenges faced by staff who seek to use it as an academic space, thereby demonstrating how the platform can become a vehicle for professional learning. Turning away from an explicit concern with technology, Ruth Pilkington studies challenges around the use of dialogue as a means of assessing professional learning. She addresses these challenges by showing that they can become rich opportunities for building rapport and a culture of mutual learning through mentoring. Gary Poole, Isabeau Iqbal, and Roselynn Verwoord likewise consider conversations, though not for assessment purposes. The challenge that they identify concerns our human tendency as academics to talk to those who are similar to us, which forecloses exposure to different views and thereby limits opportunities for learning from one another about our practice. But this challenge presents an opportunity to academic developers, who can put in place systems for tracking academics’ interests and connecting them. Finally, Heather Kanuka and Erika Smith identify a key challenge for credentialed teaching programmes in Canadian institutions of higher education: lack of clarity as to how these programmes are valued, and more particularly, whether the degree to which those who undergo such programmes value them coincides with the views of their heads of department. One key insight that their finding yields – that department heads are more sceptical about the value of a certificated course – becomes an opportunity if we see it as underscoring the need for academic/educational developers to find ways in which to demonstrate the value of programmes to heads. Recent research in IJAD and elsewhere have started revisiting the question of evidencing the value of academic development in very helpful ways (Chalmers & Gardiner, 2015; Bamber & Stefani, 2016). The role of academic development, how it is valued, and how it can be more effective has over the years been explored in several issues of IJAD. Harland and Staniforth (2003) suggested in their article from 2003 that academic development should be INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT 2019, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2019.1557870