History of CSHE

In 1968 the University Teaching Project was brought together with the Education Research Office and the Audio-Visual Aids Centre (which had been transferred to the University from the Royal Australian Air Force in 1944) to become the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, with Barbara Falk its founding director. The Centre was housed in the Audio-Visual Aids building, completed in 1957, later moving to the Redmond Barry Building, and 715 Swanston Street. It has been located in the Elisabeth Murdoch building since 2015.

With a brief to foster improvements in teaching quality, conduct research into higher education and the pioneer new teaching methods, the Centre was a vital participant in the education reform movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. It worked in association with faculties and student groups to propose alternatives to mainstays such as examination, and to introduce the first student evaluation programs, on the basis that the ‘way students approach learning is directly affected by their perception of how they are taught’. From the beginning it offered professional development (‘in-service training’) to university academics seeking to improve the learning of their students. From these busy early days, the Centre also began conducting surveys into the student experience to provide evidence for the most effective reforms to university services, faculty offerings and university teaching.

Over the following 50 years these innovations came to be incorporated systematically into the fabric of the University’s academic programs, with innovations such as the expectations that subjects state their objectives clearly introduced in the 1990s, while multimedia teaching extended its reach, greatly accelerated by the arrival of the personal computer and then the internet.