After forty years of supporting HERDSA members the question started to be asked, what was HERDSA doing for academics new to higher education research? The "R" in HERDSA was largely represented by the Society's journal Higher Education Research and Development (HERD). Getting published in HERD had become out of reach for most young scholars. A more realistic goal was to publish small scale inquiries into their own teaching practices as Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at conferences or online. SoTL was seen as a way to bridge the gap between teaching and research, encouraging higher education teachers to treat their teaching practices as a subject of scholarly inquiry. The intention was to improve educational practices and contribute to the broader academic community by producing and sharing knowledge about teaching and learning.

Recognising this gap as an opportunity for new scholars, a new initiative was started in 2011 by Deb Clarke, Rachel Spronken-Smith and Coralie McCormak who wanted to support academics new to research in higher education teaching and learning. They created a portfolio within the HERDSA Executive to build a bridge for those coming into teaching and learning as new scholars, whether they had been long-time academics or not. 

The first activity of the New Scholars portfolio was for Deb Clarke to start writing short tips and hints articles for new scholars in HERDSA News. Deb got the ideas for the articles from interactions with her colleagues who were new scholars at Charles Sturt University. She talked to them about what they needed to know about being new in academia, and new to learning and teaching. She then wrote her tips using academic language that she thought would be accessible to a broad range of people. Deb was trying to model that language to scholars new to teaching and learning so they could see that academia, while it was about scholarly thought, could be communicated in a different way.

Another source of ideas came from the work Deb Clarke was doing to get serious about her own academic writing. One of Deb's colleagues had suggested the best way to improve her writing was to become an associate editor of a journal as the requirement to read manuscripts helps in learning the language of the journal. Deb Clarke joined the HERD editorial team as an Associate Editor. This taught her about the publication process and provided a lot of tips and hints about what higher education journals are looking for and how to avoid the traps that she could pass on to the new scholars.

Lee Partridge and Leslie Peterson joined the New Scholars portfolio and with Deb Clarke had the idea was that they would introduce people who had not published in a higher education learning and teaching journal to the idea of scholarship of learning and teaching. They produced a set of draft resources and set up a New Scholars seminar series that was a bit like a flipped classroom. Seminar participants would do some work with the resources they had made and then they would all met online every fortnight to discuss their work. At the end of the seminar series a lot of the seminar participants went on to publish manuscripts or present posters on higher education teaching and learning at conferences. 

Deb Clarke, Lee Partridge and Lesley Peterson found the face-to-face seminars rewarding but was also very time consuming to maintain a schedule of fortnightly meetings. In 2014 they thought that a group of HERDSA members could make use of their experience in online learning to create online modules for new scholars. Deb Clarke, Lee Partridge and Lesley Peterson took the draft materials they created in the New Scholars seminar series to a pre-conference workshop where they were able to iron out any kinks in a face-to-face setting. They then applied for another grant from the Executive to put the materials online so they would be self-paced and stand on their own as a resource for new scholars. Deb Clarke says the three of them made a good team because they all brought different things to the process. Lee was an experienced academic developer working in a learning and teaching centre. Lesley came from New Zealand and brought a focus on the needs of Pacific Islander and Māori people and reminded the others not to always use Australian examples.

HERDSA launched a series of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) online modules in 2017. The aim was to help those new to scholarship of teaching and learning research become familiar with the nature, purpose and processes of SoTL-style research. The modules were tailored to the Australasian context with videos of prominent Australian and New Zealand HERDSA members contributing their SoTL insights. The five modules explain the why's and how's of SoTL, starting with conceptualising a SoTL project through to data collection methods and processes, and writing up and disseminating findings.