Ghent University’s strong tradition of professional development initiatives for teaching staff (members of the professorial staff as well as academic assistants) dates back to 1998. Since that time, the initiatives for individual lecturers have evolved greatly and they have been developed further. They have known quite some success as well: in the academic year 2017-2018, 63 percent of the senior full professors had taken the Introductory Teacher Training.

A confluence of events in the academic year 2019-2020 caused the existing initiatives to be thoroughly reviewed. Spurred on by the implementation of Ghent University’s Quality Assurance Conduct 2.0, the covid-induced transition from on-campus to online and blended teaching, a newly founded collaboration network through the European Enlight Consortium and a review of the Activo Project, we developed a new and more exhaustive education support offer for lecturers and teams of lecturers.

Ghent University’s Education Support Offer 2.0 is founded on the following basic principles:

• in partnership with the faculties and the study programmes;
• well-founded, contextualized and future-oriented;
• targeting individual lecturers as well as teams of lecturers;
• consisting of a basic and in-depth offer;
• combining a supply- and demand-driven offer;
• covering a broad scope (i.e. academic leadership, quality assurance processes, future-proof curricula, active blended education);
• containing once-only initiatives and learning pathways;
• introducing new professional development modalities (online, blended, on campus);
• combining peer and expert learning.