Each year we consult with our members on where and how we can support them in meeting the many challenges in higher education today.
The Collaborative Development Fund is a yearly funding scheme that seeks to offer Advance HE members grant funding to carry out project work on important sector concerns. Our member institutions in the UK are to share funding totalling almost £100,000 to find new solutions to current challenges in higher education.
By tackling important sector concerns collectively, the funding awarded by Advance HE helps our members to find new solutions and benefit from the shared learning of what works.
This year's Collaborative Development Fund introduces four broad themes are:
- Generative AI beyond assessment
- Fit for the Future: Adapting practice for the new paradigms of higher education
- Creating a Culture of Strategic EDI Change
- HE workforces of the future
More information on each project, and the teams working on them can be found below.
Keep updated on the projects
Want to receive updates on these projects? Receive updates when you register using the form below.
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.”Nick Skeet,
Director of Membership
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 concerning AI is not simply what changes it will bring but the speed at which it will happen.
Members who have successfully bid to explore Generative AI in research practice and examine Generative AI attitudes among HE stakeholders are:
University of Aberdeen with Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh Napier University and University of Dundee - Towards inclusive intelligence: a comprehensive examination of GenAI attitudes among HE stakeholders
This research aims to explore the attitudes and perceptions of diverse Higher Education (HE) stakeholders towards the integration of GenAI in academic settings.
Staffordshire University with UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE)
GAI in research practice. More information coming soon.
This CDF theme is part of a wider Member Project Generative AI: Beyond Assessment. Explore current debates on AI and assessment to consider in-depth other ways the technology will impact higher education and the communities we serve.
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, including the cost of living, globalisation, student mobility and graduate employment, necessitate changes to how higher education is structured and provided.
Members awarded funding for three separate projects to look at the role of industry placement, understand student perspectives and 'becoming' and enhance student employability through pedagogic consultancy, respectively are:
Northumbria University with the University of Liverpool and Manchester Metropolitan University - Students becoming graduates: the role of industry placement
The principal aim of this project is to examine the importance of industry placements for supporting Business students’ identity crafting, or ‘becoming’ and specifically within the context of widening participation.
Edinburgh Napier University - Listening in: playing hard to understand student perspectives and 'becoming'
The principal aim of this project is to examine the importance of industry placements for supporting Business students’ identity crafting, or ‘becoming’ and specifically within the context of widening participation.
The University of Manchester - Student knowledge exchange re-imagined
This project is aimed at enhancing student employability through innovative pedagogic KTPs. It is set to address the unique challenges faced by both marginalised and international students, leveraging their cultural capital and mitigating barriers.
This CDF theme is part of a wider Member Project Fit for the Future: Adapting practice for the new paradigms of higher education. Explore how we can adapt key areas of our education practice to these new modes of higher education.
Creating a culture of Strategic EDI Change
Strategic EDI is an approach that focuses on integrating fairness, justice, and equity into all aspects of an organisation’s operations and decision-making processes. It aims to foster an inclusive and equitable environment that values and respects the diversity, in all its forms, of all individuals in the organisation.
Members working on this project striving to build culturally competent access and outreach activity with minorities and how to design higher education for worldwide inclusive cultures are:
University of London with King's College London and University of the Arts London - Designing for worldwide inclusive cultures in higher education
This project employs design research, and recognises that marginalised communities’ experiences vary across borders, and the rights of some groups facing inequality are not often present across cultures. These global challenges could be addressed utilising an intersectional lens.
Leeds Trinity University with Go Higher West Yorkshire (GHWY) - Building culturally competent access and outreach activity with racialised minorities: a decolonised approach
The project aims to support staff who participate in access and outreach activity to better understand cultural competence in HE, its measurement and development.
This CDF theme is part of a wider Member Project Creating a Culture for Strategic EDI Change. Explore Strategic EDI as an approach that focuses on integrating fairness, justice, and equality into all aspects of an organisation's operations and decision-making processes.
HE workforces of the future
The Advance HE 2023 leadership survey report highlighted some clear synergies and some 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, well-being, and culture required to address the challenges and withstand the pressures of 21st-century higher education.
Members workingh to create accessible Design Thinking tools to support education leadership capabilities and Educational Development Communities of Practice are:
The University of Manchester with University of Leeds - Design Thinking 4 Higher Education (DT4HE)
The aim is to make design thinking more accessible to those who work in higher education. Our vision is to model DT methodologies.
University of Cambridge with University of Leeds, University of Sydney, Goldsmiths University, Bangor University, Cardiff University and University of Brighton - EdD CoP: Educational Development Communities of Practice
The principal aim of this project is to support colleagues across the higher education sector with their own teaching and learning-focused communities of practice, to develop knowledge and share practice around CoPs and support them with evaluation strategies.
This CDF theme is part of a wider Member Project Growing the HE workforce of the future. Explore how we grow the HE workforce of the future and consider the needs of the HE system: what institutions, leadership, teams, and individuals need to thrive in the face of the constantly fluctuating landscape that the sector currently finds itself in.
Past Collaborative Development Fund Projects
New challenges, new solutions. Explore some of the projects and outputs created by the Collaborative Development Fund:
- Beyond the classroom: Supporting Student Outcomes
- The Sustainable Institutions Project: An Evidence Informed Review Of Good Practice
- Inclusive institutions: enabling and supporting culture change
- Board Diversity Practice Project
If you have any queries on the Collaborative Development Fund process or themes please contact Networks@advance-he.ac.uk.