PHELT Certificate
Postgraduate Higher Education Learning and Teaching Certificate

2006 Cohort

Every other Friday afternoon, throughout Trimester One 2006, nine VUW academic The Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Learning and Teaching (Pilot) staff have met to discuss and debate current theories and research findings on teaching and learning and their practical applications. They experimented with instructional technologies and new teaching techniques. They reflected on, critically analysed, and shared their own theories and experiences of teaching and learning.and wrote essays exploring those research-teaching links. They designed research projects to carry out in Trimesters Two and Three.applied research aimed both at improving student learning outcomes and at generating PBRFeligible publications.

In short, these nine VUW academics — working with support and guidance from the UTDC.s academic staff — were taking teaching seriously as a field of scholarly endeavour. They have been applying — to the intellectual challenges and puzzles of university teaching and learning — the same powerful, rigorous thinking and problem-solving approaches and methods they routinely apply to their own disciplinary research.

These nine academics—representing 3 Faculties and 6 Schools—are the founding cohort of VUW's proposed Postgraduate Higher Education Learning & Teaching Certificate — known by its friends as the PHELT Cert. Running this year as pilot, special topics courses, the PHELT Cert is expected to be approved as a formal qualification by CUAP this July.

It has been an exciting, promising beginning. The UTDC is now ready to recruit the Class of 2007.

Among our Australian and other Commonwealth competitors, postgraduate certificates in tertiary teaching and learning are now ubiquitous. Thus, offering the PHELT Cert is a way both to meet the escalating academic development needs of Victoria's own teaching staff and, in time, to attract high-quality postgraduate enrolments from other tertiary institutions. This new qualification offers five-fold benefits to the University, its academic staff and our students. The PHELT Cert will help Victoria University of Wellington:

1. address strategic teaching and learning objectives,
2. respond to internal quality enhancement needs and external quality demands,
3. enhance academic leadership capacity within and across Faculties and Schools,
4. meet professional development needs of individual academic staff, and
5. fill a long-standing gap in our academic offerings.

To learn more about the 2007 cohort of the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Learning & Teaching please see the box on the right. We can put you in contact with current participants, as well, to get their perspectives.

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