CILT's Academic Staff Development team is a strong complement of 11 staff members comprising two NRF rated associate professors, four senior lecturers, two lecturers, a junior research fellow, a curation and publishing manager, and a staff development support administrator. One staff member is the UCT UNESCO Chair in Open Education and Social Justice. The team has expertise in learning design for blended and online contexts, innovative pedagogies, assessment, AI in education, and open education. Our current research areas include compassionate learning design, blended and online learning strategies, digital literacies, AI integration in higher education, student-staff partnerships, digital open textbooks and academic staff professional development. Our formal teaching includes postgraduate diplomas and Masters programmes in Higher Education Studies (HES) and Educational Technology, and the postgraduate diploma in Blended and Online Learning Design (BOLD).

Our staff development work spans a wide spectrum of activities, including workshops and training, curriculum and programme design and review, teaching and assessment resource production, postgraduate teaching and supervision, applied research, and providing input into institutional policies and frameworks that support socially just and future-oriented education. We champion socially just innovation, care and critical engagement in learning, teaching and assessment at the university. The team also advocates for critical and sustainable adoption of post-digital education, focusing on the entanglements of humans and technologies in highly unequal contexts.

Our ethos is rooted in social justice, decoloniality, a commitment to accessible and equitable learning, and a belief in the power of openness. We approach our work through empathy and a pedagogy of care, building strong relational networks with colleagues within and beyond the university. Our practices are sustained, flexible, responsive, and often co-created with colleagues and students. This collaborative spirit ensures that our initiatives are contextually grounded and responsive to disciplinary concerns, philosophical stances and socio-economic realities – meeting people where they are to collectively navigate the persistent uncertainties of teaching and learning in higher education.

The team also contributes to broader academic staff development programmes at UCT such as supporting the New Academic Practitioners Programme (NAPP), Research Office and Postgraduate Office initiatives. Beyond the university, team members contribute roles in national and international associations such as Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA), the Open Education Global Consortium, and the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN). Some team members are also part of editorial boards for international journals in the higher education field.

Key projects that we work on include:

  1. Centering student voice through 'Student as partners’ initiatives, such as the Designing for Social Justice Partnership project where students and lecturers from UCT, University of the Western Cape and Cape Peninsula University co-create course curricula.
  2. Championing the Digital Open Textbooks initiative which has supported student-staff partnerships in co-authoring course materials and digital textbooks.
  3. Widening higher education access through the Blended and Online Learning Design (BOLD) project, where short courses serve as micro-credentials for the BOLD postgraduate diploma. Research in this area includes a focus on micro-credentialing, emergent learning design, and the professionalisation of the field of learning design.
  4. Tutor development

What makes us distinctive is our human-centred approach to research- and theory-informed practice, our interdisciplinary orientation, and our co-teaching approach that draws on the diverse expertise, skills and theoretical foundations within our team and beyond. Our strong critical educational technology focus ensures that digital innovation is always accompanied by ethical, inclusive, and pedagogically sound approaches to staff development.

Our professional development activities include: