Good ideas should be implemented. Important questions should be researched. New skills and understandings should be pursued. In our experience university teachers attempt to do these things as best they can and this usually means with poor resourcing. New ideas, by their very nature, are precluded from appearing in forward budgeting plans. Even if this were not so, the economic climate forecasts do not suggest that university departments will have budgets able to support innovation and research into teaching and learning as often as we are able to generate the new ideas.
This scarcity of resources provides an imperative that any application must be well researched, thoroughly developed and include an effective evaluation strategy. To be successful the application must support the intentions and interests of the funding body. The development of such a submission is indeed an exercise in scholarship.
The Unit Researching and Writing a Teaching Development Grant Application was prepared by John Milton of RMIT for inclusion on the ultiBASE site. It provides an excellent guide to the development of a successful grant application. It is scholarly in its approach and takes as its context the improvement of university teaching to enhance student learning. The unit provides guidelines for the development of successful grant submissions.
It includes
Getting to know the funding scheme
Building on previous experience
Preparing the submission
See Researching and Writing a Teaching Development Grant Application