• How does the project address a priority context?

• What is the need for the project?
• How does the project engage with the current teaching and learning scholarship for the area?
• How does it align with the stated priority context/s for this round of grants?

• Is the project feasible (i.e., can it be done in the chosen context, timeframe, and with the requested resources)?
• Does the researcher (with their collaborators) have the training and experience to conduct the research?
• Is the project design and implementation ethical (e.g. can students opt out of the research component of the project without implications for their unit performance)?
• Does a blanket ethics approval exist for this project or do the team have an appropriate plan to obtain ethics approval through one of the University’s Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs)?

• How is the proposed project innovative in its context?
• How well is the project grounded in current educational scholarship and best practices?

• Does the project involve collaboration? (This might include collaboration with industry, with other staff, across schools/faculties, with other universities, and with students.)
• How will this collaboration benefit the project and improve the outcomes?

• How widespread would the impacts of this study be (in its proposed form)?
• Is there potential for the project’s approaches and findings to be scaled or adapted to other contexts at the University (or beyond)?
• How does the project address the needs of a diverse student body, ensuring equity and inclusion in learning and assessment, overcoming barriers to student success for all students?

• How will the research project enhance teaching and learning practice and the student experience at the University?
• How will the project team ensure that the outcomes are sustained beyond the funding period?
• What are the plans for dissemination within and beyond the University, and how will they contribute to longer-term improvement in our understanding and delivery of good teaching and learning?

The 2025 EF SoTL Grants program will fund grants of up to $5K or $10K, for EF academics’ Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research.

Grant recipients will have approximately 20 months to spend their grant from the time of award. Unspent funds at the closure date (November 30^th, 2026) will be lost – there is no ability to roll them into the following year. There will be no extensions to the closure date for each award.

Later funding applications are contingent on successful review of progress at the end of the initial EF SoTl Grant funding. Applicants are encouraged to carefully scope their projects, with the intention of completing them within the time frame of the granting period.

EF academics will only be eligible to apply for further tranches of EF SoTL Grant funds after they demonstrate they have successfully completed their first EF SoTl Grant project. Successful completion of the project also entails use of the funds for the stated purpose of the funded grant. As such, applying for a smaller amount of funding for a smaller project may be advisable.

Academics who are employed on an EF contract can apply. Casual staff can be members of the grant team but they cannot be the project lead. The application will be evaluated against clear criteria to demonstrate how the research project will improve teaching and learning practice and the student experience at the University. We want to support ideas that aim to resolve the issues our students have told us that they are facing: connection with learning, engagement, AI, and assessment.  

Yes. These grants are for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research. We want to support the development of a transformational learning experience at the University of Sydney through this research.

The grants can be used for research-related costs, including:

• Research support around course improvement/student learning/student experience/identified focus areas as noted above (e.g. through hiring project manager, research assistant, student researchers) 
• Support for research participants (e.g. gifts cards or catering for students who are part of the research)
• Education conference attendance (where home faculty or school is unable to support travel/registration)
• Visiting other universities or locations for the purposes of collaboration or collecting research data
• Software needed to collect/analyse results (after consultation with Education Innovation team).  

No. This funding should not be spent on professional development activities.

The University offers professional development opportunities for EF staff. These include Our Educators Community of Practice and The Modular Professional Learning Framework (MPLF).

Additional professional development is available through these avenues:

• HERDSA (Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia) has an excellent suite of SoTL training and support resources for members.
• Center for Teaching and Learning University of Georgia has a wide variety of free resources.

No. You can only use the grants for research projects that relate to education. You can apply for a grant to conduct research as it relates to education in your discipline.

There are some things that cannot be funded with these grants:

• Teaching buyout 
• Purchase of non-approved software
  
• Implementation of non-approved software in teaching
  
• Building and implementation of non-University LMS or non-University replacement websites for core delivery of units
  
• Disciplinary research that is not explicitly related to improving teaching, learning, and the student experience 
• Disciplinary research that increases the stock of knowledge in your discipline, so that this knowledge can be incorporated into teaching.

Applicants are encouraged to address the kinds of research questions described below.

Active and engaged learning

Research questions for this area could address the design, implementation, and evaluation of active and engaged learning strategies and activities for students in your discipline. These might include:

• Involving students as citizens of their own lifelong learning journey.
• Experiential and/or service learning
• Delivering blended learning to maximise engagement and outcomes
• Transforming assessment and feedback practices to engage students
• Improving belonging.

AI in teaching and learning

Research questions for this area could address the use of AI in teaching and learning, which may include the use of AI in instruction and in assessment.

Assessment

Research questions for this area could address one or more of these problems:

• Design of assessment for learning which privileges assessment of the process of learning
• Using assessment to help students reflect, engage in problem solving, and direct their own learning strategies
• Authentic assessment that engages and connects students with disciplinary, workplace, and personal goals
• Using assessment and feedback to enable staged and scaffolded development of students’ skills and knowledge.

Equity and inclusion in teaching

Research questions for this area could address one or more of these opportunities:

• Implementation of design for diversity (and Universal Design for Learning)
•   The mixed-ability class
• The mixed-culture class
• Considering and creating equity in experiences and outcomes
• Considering and fostering inclusion and sense of belonging.

Teaching spaces and places

Research questions for this area could address one or more of these problems:

• Innovative use of space and place for teaching
• The impact of space and place on active and engaged teaching and learning
• The impact of space and place on belonging.

Work Integrated Learning (WIL)

Research questions for this area could address one or more of these problems:

• Offering WIL at scale
• Increasing WIL in non-traditional disciplines, contexts, and settings
• The impact of AI on the experience and assessment of WIL.

There is no requirement for you to work with students as part of this grant. You may choose, however, to employ a student research assistant, or co-research with an undergraduate coursework, honours, masters, or PhD student. It is likely your research will include data collection that involves students and their learning. Please ensure that your students are giving informed consent to be involved in your ethics-approved study.

Generally, yes. The application form for the grants asks you to provide details about existing ethics approvals or your plans for a new ethics approval.

Here are some guidelines about when you need ethics approval for SoTL:

• If you are working with data collected from people, or from non-public records, and you wish to publish your research, or otherwise disseminate it in a manner that advances your career (including using it as evidence of output for confirmation or promotion), you need ethics approval.
• If you are working with student or staff data you collect (including their opinions, learning artefacts, and assessment outputs), or the data of community members, you need ethics approval to do the work, unless you are never going to disseminate the results.
• If you are collecting data that you will use in the future (e.g. for a longitudinal study in which you are looking for changes over time) you need informed consent in perpetuity from the data contributors. This means you need an ethics approval with provision for data access and use in perpetuity.  

There are some situations in which you don’t need ethics approval:

• If you are conducting desktop research with publicly available documents, you do not need ethics approval.
• If the work is being done solely to improve the quality of teaching or the student experience and you will never disseminate the results beyond your own teaching team, you don’t need ethics approval. Please remember that using the data to progress your own career (which includes using it in a promotion application) can constitute dissemination. A confirmation or promotion committee will want to know that you have an ethics approval to collect and use data.

Please make sure you have considered whether you need ethics approval before you start your study. Remember, it is very unusual to gain retroactive ethics approval and even rarer to get retroactive informed consent from participants. Conducting an education or SoTL study without prior ethics approval is generally not advised.

If you are unsure whether you need ethics approval, or you do need ethics approval, you can check the requirements and/or apply through the University channels. Please also check with your school, as a blanket ethics application may also be in place.

Yes. These grants are only awarded to EF academics as the primary investigators. Academics who are operating as EF, but who are not formally employed on an EF contract, are not eligible. EF academics may collaborate with other academic or professional staff in the University on their application. Collaboration is encouraged and will be considered favourably.

Yes. Applications for more than $10K can be made by collaborative groups of EF academics.

Awards for collaborating EF academics will be split evenly between the applicants. For example, an award of $30K to a group of three EF academics will be allocated as $10K for each academic. An award of $15K to a group of three EF academics will be allocated as $5K for each academic.

Collaboration is encouraged and will be considered favourably.

Collaboration is very important if the EF academic does not have the skill set necessary to conduct the research. In such a case, collaboration with a skilled SoTL researcher is essential for the success of the project.

Academics are encouraged to join the Academic Educators Community of Practice (on Teams) to find collaborators within the University.

A discussion of SoTL for EF academics can be found in these Teaching@Sydney blog posts and their associated references:

• Research for education focused academics: A current conversation
• What does excellent scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) look like?

• Academics who are employed on an EF contract (as defined by the Enterprise Agreement 2023-2026) can apply. These grants are only awarded to EF academics as the primary investigators.
• Academics who are operating as EF, but who are not formally employed on an EF contract, are not eligible to apply as primary investigators. Casual staff can be members of the grant team, but they cannot be the project lead. Non-EF academics (e.g. 40:40:20 academics) are welcome to apply as part of the project team with the EF lead.
• EF academics may collaborate with other academic or professional staff in the University on their application and project. Collaboration is encouraged and will be considered favourably.

• Casual staff who do not have a formal 70:20:10 EF appointment can be
  members of the grant team, but they cannot be the project lead.

• Yes, but we recommend each EF academic is on a maximum of two grants. 
• We also recommend that each EF academic is only on one grant as the lead. These projects take significant time and commitment. Application on more than one or two grants will reduce your capacity to deliver on your project.
• If an EF is on multiple grants, and we can’t understand how much funding that academic is applying for, it will be very difficult for the program to award funding fairly, and according to the published grant conditions. In such a case we would err on the side of caution and award funds to applications and sets of applicants that do clearly meet the criteria and reporting requirements for the program.

• No. For accounting purposes, each grant must have a single lead who is also the responsible budget holder.

• The money does not have to be split evenly when it is being spent. The funding will be placed into one account per grant, with a primary budget holder who is the lead academic on the project. This lead academic and primary budget holder needs to be an EF academic. Funds cannot be held by non-EF academics. The EF academic lead can decide how to allocate the money, by agreement with co-applicants, but for simplicity of accounting, it should all be spent from the one account, without formal splitting into multiple smaller accounts.

• You are welcome to do this. If you want the funds allocated to a particular EF academic, you should note, in the budget table, how the funds are to be allocated and spent; you can allocate $ amounts there to indicate the agreement that the co-applicants have reached. 
• It is especially important that you indicate conference registration/travel for EF academics in the budget, because it is important to clearly understand who is going to benefit from the funds and allocate them accordingly in your budget plan.

• If the applicants do not specify how the funds are to be split we will record them as split evenly between all the EFs on the grant application (although you as recipients are not bound to spend them as an equal split). All monies awarded in each grant will be allocated, in our records, as granted to the EF academics on the project. So, for example, if two EF academics and four non-EF academics applied together for a grant of $20K, we would allocate that as $10K per EF academic. Those EF academics would have reached their limit for this round.
• Please also note that the money is not applied to an academic’s salary and cannot be used to buy out teaching time. Instead, it is for expenditure on things like a research assistant (and the other allowed expenses as detailed on the internet). Thus, it might be best to work together to hire one research assistant or another type of resource for the project, rather than attempting to split the money up into small buckets for expenditure by individual academics.

• No. No individual EF can be awarded more than $10K in this round.
• Remember that each time your name appears on a grant application as an EF, part of the grant will be allocated against your application allowance (unless you clearly specify in the budget how much funding is to be allocated to each academic.
• Consider this example:
  • An EF academic applies for a $10K grant as a lead (call this Grant A)
  • They also apply for another $20K grant as a single ‘team member’ (with a different EF academic as the lead) (call this Grant B). On Grant B there are no formal allocations of funds described in the Budget table, so it is assumed that the funds are to be split evenly between the two academics.
  • Only one of these applications could be funded, because the Grant B income would be split evenly between the two EF academics (both would be allocated $10K).
    

• Thus, including your name on multiple grants without a clear indication of planned funding splits may reduce the likelihood of the grants being funded. Please choose the one or maximum two project/s you consider to be most important and only apply for those.