From its very beginning HERDSA attracted members from a variety of fields including student counsellors, librarians, technical teachers, study skills advisors, or discipline-based academics. With such a wide range of interests among its members, one of the early suggestions to emerge from the first HERDSA conference was to have a call for the formation of special interest groups (SIGs) that could be used as a reason for members to meet between annual conferences. Initially, SIGs were conceived as member-only meetings advertised in the HERDSA Newsletter but quickly became open to non-members usually from the host institution.

Our first Special Interest Group

It was always likely that the narrow focus of any SIG would only ever have a finite ability to engage the HERDSA community and few lasted very long. The first HERDSA SIG was on laboratory practice, coordinated by Alan Prosser and enthusiastically supported by Roger Landbeck. The SIG was active throughout the 1970s and produced the first HERDSA publication "Laboratory Teaching in Tertiary Science" in 1978.

Calls for HERDSA to take a special interest in computers in education at around the same time failed to materialise in any substantive way. SIGs that formed to only met at the annual conference quickly lost the reason for their existence and the group would quietly fold when the SIG's original organisers inevitably moved into new roles with different responsibilities and new leadership failed to materialise.

Personalised Systems of Instruction

Most SIGs relied on the enthusiasm of individual HERDSA members with a strong interest in an area of higher education research and development and a desire to meet others to find out more about a topic. One of the longest running of the early SIGs was on Personalised Systems of Instruction that was originally coordinated by Alan Lonsdale. Personalised instruction was a concept Alan had been promoting within the Educational Development Unit at the West Australia Institute of Technology. There was widespread interest in the topic, and academics like Ilma Brewer, who was a Biology lecturer at the University of Sydney, developed a national reputation in this area. For most of the 1980s Individualised Instruction was the only SIG actively involved in meeting, presenting workshops at the HERDSA Conference, and publishing a regular newsletter in HERDSA News.   

The rise of Language and Learning

The formation of the Language and Learning Special Interest Group was organised by Carolyn Webb in 1987 and attracted 40 people to the first meeting.The SIG grew out of the Sydney Study Skills group that ran workshops on study skills research and development. Peggy Nightingale became a key member of the SIG as she tried to encourage her study skills mates to think of HERDSA as a logical home for them. Peggy saw the SIG as a way people who shared particular interests could come together an discuss relevant issues without upsetting people with no interest in the group. By 1995 the Language and Learning SIG had grown larger than the general HERDSA membership reporting the SIG had approximately 300 members. With such a large interest in language and learning within the Society, efforts were made to incorporate a language and learning forum into the HERDSA annual conference along the lines of the Educational Developer's Day. As the number of academic language and learning staff continued to expand in universities, the focus of SIG members shifted to their own annual conference and by 2005 most SIG members had left HERDSA to join their own professional association to represent tertiary academic language and learning educators in Australia.

The decline of Academic Development

Directors of academic development units was the group that played the largest role in shaping the HERDSA agenda, albeit in a largely informal way. From the earliest days the group met after each HERDSA conference to discuss the issues that affected the management of their units. As Bob Cannon recalled, that led to tension among some HERDSA members who perceived the Directors as being a powerful sub-group within the Society. For their part, the Directors saw themselves as HERDSA members first and foremost but would take advantage of the opportunity to meet informally with colleagues at HERDSA conferences.

HERDSA quickly emerged at the natural home for staff in the growing number of department being introduced in many higher education institutions that most people called 'educational development'. An Educational Developers Day was introduced to follow the Brisbane conference in 1983 and became a regular feature of HERDSA conferences from that point on. Ten years later questions were asked whether the Society was still able to meet the professional needs of educational developers given the changing profile of HERDSA away from academic developers to an increase in the language and learning skills group, especially once the Educational Developers Day was dropped as a regular feature of the conference.

At the Rockhampton conference in1995 it was decided to establish an Academic Development Special Interest Group (ADSIG) to give academic developers their own voice within HERDSA. John Jones, Peggy Nightingale, Margot Pearson, and Graham Webb combined as coordinators to seed discussion on the email listserv every six to eight weeks. The idea was to act as a 'brains-trust' to help academic developers to deal with challenges that might arise in their professional practice. Peggy Nightingale explains that ADSIG was formed at a time when universities were thinking about whether the units they had set up should be more than teaching and learning units. Different models were being tried in different institutions and the Academic Development Special Interest Group was about those structures, and administrative questions such as who should be involved in a unit, how, and at what level.

Many SIG members used the annual conference as an opportunity to meet in person and in 1998 Barbara Grant took over coordination of the ADSIG. Barbara had recently moved from student learning counselling into academic development, and she was looking for a forum to talk to other people involved in academic development. After the conference, the SIG members kept in contact with each other through the HERDSA listserv. SIG members would post, and respond to comments and there was quite a lot of discussion. The SIG continued in this vein for a few years but slowly the amount of online interaction declined. In 2003 Barbara Grant was in the final stages of writing up her PhD and had to step away from moderating the ADSIG. At the 2004 Conference she asked if anyone was willing to take over the role and when no-one agreed to step forward ADSIG was formally disbanded after the conference

A year later the Directors of academic units decided to split from HERSDA and establish the Council of Australian Directors of Academic Development (CADAD). Allan Goody was on the inaugural CADAD Executive and thought that having the informal heads of units meeting as part of the HERDSA Conference was a good thing, but if that group created its own association, then HERDSA should be a member of CADAD. Shelda Debowski agrees that it would have been beneficial for the President of HERDSA to be part of that network, even if she or he was not a director of a unit. CADAD was not open to that idea however and did not accept HERDSA as a member organisation. Shelda saw this reluctance by CADAD to accept HERDSA members was a way of it to establish itself as the peak body for teaching and learning in higher education. For Allan Goody the obvious role for an organisation that had the ear of the Deputy Vice Chancellors (DVC)s was in policy advocacy, a role the directors had played within HERDSA and one the Society would gladly give up. Allan believed there was scope for collaboration between the two organisations in developing professional programs for academic developers because it was the directors who would fund their staff to attend HERDSA programs.

Revitalising the SIGs

Following the success of the Sydney conference in 2005 Simon Barrie moved to establish a Phenomenography Special Interest Group. Simon was using phenomenography in his PhD research and found that a lot of other people wanted to learn about it. After testing the waters at a phenomenography conference held in Sydney, Simon proposed HERDSA establish the Phenomenography SIG to bring together people who could learn from each other and make what they had learned accessible to the many PhD students who were SIG members.  During discussions with teaching-only academics Simon Barrie saw that there was enough interest in higher education research in NSW that would potentially bring together a local community of HERDSA members. Simon proposed expanding the Phenomenography SIG to become a NSW HERDSA network of higher education researchers. Simon wrote to all Directors of NSW academic development units for support and suggestions for networking activities.

In 2014 the HERDSA Executive had decided to try to re-energise the Special Interest Groups and made a call for expressions of interest. Deb Clarke applied to co-chair the new Students as Researchers SIG that had developed from the work she was doing related to new scholars. Deb saw undergraduate researchers as the academics of the future and she was aware that learning and teaching problems need specific solutions that relate to a discipline, or a particular culture of learning and teaching within that interest area.

In 2016 the HERDSA Executive again decided to gauge member’s interests and called for applications to establish SIGs. The executive understood that it is part of the nature of special interest groups they would come and go as some new tend in research and development would grab the imagination of the higher education community. The challenge in maintaining SIGs is their tendency towards fragmentation by narrowing the broader mission of the Society into areas of specialised knowledge. Those SIGS that endure for an extended period of time indicate a need greater than can be provided under the HERDSA umbrella and eventually HERSDA members drift away from the Society to form an organisation that caters to the speicalised interests of their field.