SALTI and CHER (2019-2021)

These two organisational elements had overlapping interests in promoting research and scholarship around education themes at St Andrews; the Centre for Higher Education Research (CHER), and the St Andrews Learning and Teaching Initiative (SALTI).

Research and scholarship around teaching and learning are clearly becoming more important as core activities in the current HE environment. In this context the emergence of the St Andrews Learning and Teaching Initiative (SALTI), led by Jon Issberner, was a crucially important development.

The CHER co-directors met regularly with the SALTI board members, and collaborated on several initiatives of common interest. For example, SALTI developed a series of webinars on research methodology topics, and CHER members are among those who have run these webinar sessions.

The development of SALTI was part of the change in climate that has allowed CHER to gradually focus more on helping active higher education researchers to share and promote their work, network with each other to build new collaborations, seek new sources of funding by providing a strong research environment, and generally stimulating increasing productivity and excellence in our higher education research outputs through collegial engagement and support.

Many common activities were carried out as joint initiatives by CHER and SALTI, given numerous overlaps in membership and common goals.

SALTI was reformed under a new banner, with the establishment and development of the Community of Practice (CELPiE) in 2021 and 2022. CHER continues to forge close ties with CELPiE.