This is an open access book. It draws from relevant theories and approaches to teachers’ professional development (TPD) and innovative and inspiring TPD practices in higher education. It first lays a solid foundation for the rest of the book, through critiquing prevalent theories, approaches, and teaching competency frameworks guiding TPD in higher education, and defining the key concepts related to TPD. The book then develops a standard framework and assessment instrument of teaching competencies as well as ways of using this framework by institutions, departments at different levels, and individual teachers. It also proposes strategies for improving teachers’ teaching competencies by reviewing what has been achieved to date in TPD in terms of national-level policies and strategies, institutional-level interventions, and teachers’ self-directed professional development. Finally, it also presents case studies of typical practices in TPD in different countries.
Dr. Jiangang Cheng is Professor of the Institute of Education at Tsinghua University, China. He is one of the leading scholars in online education and educational technology in Higher and Vocational Education. His research findings on vocational education were published in ‘The Specifications of Digital Campus Construction for Vocational Institutes’, which was issued by the Ministry of Education as a reference book for 11,000 Chinese Vocational Colleges and Schools. In the past 20 years, his team has developed ‘Tsinghua Education Online (THEOL)’, a learning management system that is being used in more than 500 Chinese universities and colleges, with 800,000 online courses and over 5 million users.
Dr. Wei Han is Executive Deputy Director of the International Centre for Higher Education Innovation under the auspices of UNESCO, Professor of the Center for Higher Education Research at Southern University of Science and Technology, China, and Co-Director of the Data Center for Higher Education in Greater Bay Area in China. She serves as Executive Member of the Council of China Association of Higher Education Evaluation and Executive Member of the Council of the Guangdong Society of Higher Education, China. Her fields of study focus on higher education theory and policy, university governance and reform, talent training innovation, and residential college system of modern universities. She has undertaken a number of provincial and ministerial research projects and served as Consulting Expert on the strategy and human resources planning of many universities and educational institutions.
Dr. Qian Zhou is Senior Engineer of the Institute of Education at Tsinghua University, China. His research focuses on design, development, application, and evaluation of e-learning environment, institutional education reform, and innovation through technology in higher education and vocational education. The e-learning platform developed by his team has been adopted in more than 500 universities and vocational schools in China. He was granted a number of awards for his research, such as the Beijing Science and Technology Awards in 2014, the Beijing Excellent Research
Achievements in Philosophy and Social Sciences in 2019, and Provincial Teaching Achievement Awards seven times from 2018 to 2022 in China for his research in the educational technology area.
Dr. Shuyan Wang is Tenured Professor of Instructional Technology and Design at the School of Leadership in The University of Southern Mississippi, the United States of America (USA), and she earned her doctoral degree in Instructional Technology from Ohio University, USA. She has been designing and teaching online courses and creating multimedia instructional materials as online supplementary materials since the early 2000s. She has not only taught instructional technologies and theories in class, but also integrated those techniques and theories into practice with excellent results. Her research interests include integrating technology into curricula, distance education and development, assessments, and e-portfolios. She has published 40 articles and 11 books. She served as President of the Society of International Chinese in Educational Technology (SICET) for three terms during 2007–2010 and served in leadership at several other professional associations.
