The Expansion of Academic Development: The Challenges of Organizational Coordination and Collaboration

Research universities have in recent years invested a lot of resources in developing their capacity to act and function as more strategic actors in research and teaching. This has resulted in an extensive expansion of activities that are labelled as academic development and a broadened scope of actors and initiatives in this area. The expansion of academic development has also caused considerable challenges as to how all this activity should be coordinated and led. This chapter identifies the drivers behind the expansion of academic development, illustrates how such expansion takes place in two universities and discusses the future implications for the work to improve the quality of teaching and learning.