Recent changes in public funding for university teaching in Australia indicate a shift from encouraging innovation to rewarding performance. These changes also require a focus on the student learning experience seen holistically—at the levels of whole-of-degree, campus and institution. This invites a more systematic approach to the improvement of pedagogical practice. This paper reports an attempt to explore the literature on the scholarship of learning and teaching (SoLT) in order to inform such an approach. Our experience is that there is very little relevant literature. We call for an expansion of the SoLT to assist universities to respond to these new challenges.

Keywords: scholarship of teaching; pedagogical effectiveness; empirical research