Have you ever sat down to write a teaching portfolio or promotion application and felt a creeping sense of dread, not because you're a poor teacher, but because you have no idea how to prove you're a good one? You know your students. You've redesigned that unit three times. You've driven hours to reach a regional campus, taught across time zones, supported students who are the first in their family to attend university, and genuinely cared. But translating all of that into a coherent, evidence-based narrative, one that competes on the same terms as colleagues at well-resourced metropolitan universities? That's not just a different skill. It's a different game entirely.

The Bar Keeps Rising:  But Not Equally for Everyone

Higher education has shifted, quietly but significantly. Teaching quality, student experience, and educational impact now sit at the centre of institutional agendas. Teaching-focused and education-focused academic roles have expanded rapidly across the sector¹, and with them, the expectation that academics can articulate their practice with the same rigour we'd expect of a research output.

Promotion panels want evidence. Fellowship applications demand reflection. Teaching award nominations require demonstrated impact. These are not unreasonable asks. But they assume a level of capability and a level of resourcing that institutions have largely left academics to develop on their own².

For academics at regional and remote universities, this assumption bites harder. Teaching at a university like the University of New England means serving students spread across vast distances, often through online and blended modes, with fewer dedicated academic development staff, smaller peer networks, and less institutional infrastructure for professional learning. The expectations, however, remain identical to those at large, well-funded metropolitan institutions. That's not a level playing field. That's an unfair game, and the sector has been slow to name it.

The Support Gap Nobody Talks About

Here's the uncomfortable truth: while expectations for evidencing teaching have intensified, structured support for developing this capability has not kept pace, creating a widening gap between what institutions expect and what academics are actually equipped to do³.

Structural and cultural barriers compound the problem. Limited time, insufficient training, a lack of incentives, and tensions with professional identity all constrain engagement in scholarly teaching practice. Many academics consequently lack both the confidence and the clarity to articulate their teaching as scholarly work. This uncertainty doesn't just affect individuals; it shapes how teaching is understood, evidenced, and valued across entire institutions⁴.

Even where recognition pathways exist, the challenge persists. As Bull et al. (2025) found, teaching alone is insufficient for recognition unless it is translated into forms aligned with institutional expectations for promotion and advancement. That translation from lived practice to evidence-based narrative is a learned capability. And most academics are expected to acquire it without any structured support.

At regional universities, this gap widens further. Academics there often carry heavier teaching loads, serve more complex student cohorts, and operate with fewer colleagues to workshop ideas with or seek mentoring from. When promotion time arrives, their evidence is measured against benchmarks shaped largely by metropolitan norms that rarely account for the distinct conditions of regional practices. The achievements are real. The recognition, too often, is not.

It's not a capability problem. It's a support problem compounded by a fairness problem. And the sector needs to own both.

What "Good Support" Actually Looks Like

So, what would genuine support look like? It goes well beyond a one-off workshop or a tip sheet buried in an intranet. Effective professional learning in this space needs to be structured, sustained, and scaffolded, helping academics move from vague claims about their teaching to specific, evidence-rich narratives that connect what they do to the difference it makes.

Professional ePortfolios offer one powerful mechanism for this kind of translation, turning teaching practice into structured narratives of claim, reflection, and impact. But portfolios don't build themselves. Many academics cannot use them effectively, and without structured support, that gap persists⁶. Recent Australasian research reinforces this point, finding similar capability challenges among both teaching-focused academics and third space professionals who support teaching and learning practice⁷.

Genuine support means communities of practice where educators workshop their ideas alongside peers, including peers from other institutions, so that regional academics aren't isolated in their own small corners of the sector. It means mentoring from colleagues who've navigated these pathways before. And it means giving academics a real intellectual scaffold one that helps them think clearly about their teaching claims, the evidence that supports them, the reflections that deepen them, and the impact that validates them.

This isn't a luxury. For institutions serious about teaching excellence wherever they sit on the map, it's a baseline obligation.

Something Is Shifting, And Here's Why It Matters

The good news? The conversation is changing. Researchers, academic developers, and institutional leaders are beginning to ask harder questions about what structured support actually looks like and whether current approaches are fit for purpose across the full diversity of the sector, not just its most visible institutions.

There is growing recognition that evidencing teaching is itself a learnable capability, shaped through professional learning rather than an implicit academic skill. And there is growing appetite for cross-institutional approaches that bring regional and metropolitan academics into the same professional learning communities, levelling, at least in part, a playing field that has been tilted for too long.

That shift matters because when academics are genuinely supported to articulate their teaching as scholarly practice, everyone benefits. Students, including those in regional and remote communities who depend on committed, capable educators, encounter teachers who reflect more deliberately on their impact. Institutions build cultures where teaching is valued, not just measured. And academics themselves gain the confidence and language to advocate for the work they do every day, regardless of postcode.

What's Coming Next

I'm currently leading a HERDSA-funded research project with colleagues from La Trobe University - Building Capability for Teaching Recognition: Evaluating the CERI Professional Learning Framework - that sits right at the heart of this issue. The CERI framework (Claim–Evidence–Reflection–Impact) offers a structured scaffold to help teaching-focused academics construct evidence-based narratives of their practice, aligned with recognition pathways like promotion, fellowship, and teaching awards. Running across the University of New England and La Trobe University, the project deliberately spans regional and metropolitan contexts because the challenges of evidencing teaching excellence don't look the same everywhere, and the solutions shouldn't either.

The project combines workshops, mentoring, and a community of practice to examine how capability, confidence, and teaching efficacy develop over time, using a mixed-methods SoTL design. Findings will be shared through ePortfolio Australia, ASCILITE networks, HERDSA channels, including the Education-Focused academics HERDSA SIG (a new SIG which will offer individual mentoring for academics). 

Having said this, ePortfolio development is not the solution to the issue of support I mentioned above; it’s one of the effective support mechanisms. If this resonates with your experience, whether you're teaching in a regional town or a city campus, I'd love to hear from you.

References

Banner image generated by Gemini