Advance HE members are encouraged to apply for project funding to help members find new solutions to the current challenges in higher education and benefit from the shared learning of what works.
The Collaborative Development Fund is a yearly funding scheme offering Advance HE members grants to carry out project work on important sector challenges and concerns. In 2023-2024, grants of up to £10,000 across four themes are available.
Collaborative Development Fund 2023-24 themes
Suggested topics of particular interest are listed under each theme but applications are not limited to these suggestions.
Generative AI: Beyond assessment
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world at an unprecedented pace, and higher education is no exception. The big challenge for higher education is not what changes AI will bring but the speed at which it will happen. Possible ideas for project themes might include investigating the benefits and challenges of generative AI to tailor curriculum, content and feedback, among others. Find out more.
Fit for the Future: adapting practice for the new paradigms of higher education
The higher education landscape is shifting and diversifying to meet the changing needs of students and employers. Post-pandemic changes to student expectations, experiences and prior learning combined with external factors necessitate changes to how higher education is structured and provided.
Possible ideas for project themes might include managing ‘techno-stress’ and digital transformation and digital leadership. Find out more
Creating a culture of strategic EDI change
Strategic equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is an approach that focuses on integrating fairness, justice and equity into all aspects of an organisation’s operations and decision-making processes. While its aims may vary, its outcomes and the potential impact on the organisation has been shown positively correlate with improved decision-making, an inclusive equitable and supportive work/study environment and increases in innovation and growth.
Questions which could be addressed by this project include how institutions can expand their strategic approach to EDI to include additional and emerging characteristics and how to use intersectionality as a lens to support strategic EDI change. Find out more.
HE workforces of the future
The Advance HE 2023 leadership survey report highlighted clear synergies and startling divergences between the perspectives of ‘me as a leader’ and ‘my experience of being led’. This project seeks to understand the systemic issues exposed by the survey and explores the resources, extent and scope for our institutional leadership and systems to develop the staff, wellbeing and culture required to address the challenges and withstand the pressures of 21st century higher education.
Possible questions which could be addressed by this project include what we can learn from design thinking to transform ways of working for continuous improvement, or what can we learn from indigenous models of leadership and community to transform our ways of working. Find out more.
Nick Skeet, Director of Membership, said, “I’m delighted to launch our Collaborative Development Fund for 2023-24.
“The CDF allows us to use our reach, convening power and the breadth of expertise and experience from right across our global membership to support you in meeting the contemporary challenges in higher education. These challenges call for sector-wide thinking so the funding awarded by Advance HE helps members to find and amplify new solutions and benefit from the shared learning of what works.
“We look forward to working with members in the 2023-24 membership year to help ensure this funding and the learning it enables makes a difference for all our members.”